19Th Century category: 5646 books
The Impossible Presidency
The Rise and Fall of America's Highest Office
Language: English
Release Date: September 12, 2017
A bold new history of the American presidency, arguing that the successful presidents of the past created unrealistic expectations for every president since JFK, with enormously problematic implications for American politics
In The Impossible Presidency, celebrated historian Jeremi Suri charts...
Dividing the Union
Jesse Burgess Thomas and the Making of the Missouri Compromise
Language: English
Release Date: November 16, 2015
Winner, ISHS Superior Achievement Award for a Scholarly Publication, 2016
In 1820 the Missouri controversy erupted over the issue of slavery in the newly acquired lands of the Louisiana Purchase. It fell to Jesse Burgess Thomas (1777–1853), a junior U.S. senator from the new state of Illinois,...
Louis Agassiz
Creator of American Science
Language: English
Release Date: February 5, 2013
“This book is not just about a man of science but also about a scientific culture in the making—warts and all.” —The New York Times Book Review
Charismatic and controversial Swiss immigrant Louis Agassiz took America by storm in the early nineteenth century, becoming a defining force...
The Butchering Art
Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
Language: English
Release Date: October 17, 2017
Winner, 2018 PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing
Short-listed for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize
A Top 10 Science Book of Fall 2017, Publishers Weekly
A Best History Book of 2017, The Guardian
"Warning: She spares no detail!" —Erik Larson, bestselling author of Dead...
Island of Vice
Theodore Roosevelt's Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York
Language: English
Release Date: March 13, 2012
A ROLLICKING NARRATIVE HISTORY OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S EMBATTLED TENURE AS POLICE COMMISSIONER OF CORRUPT, PLEASURE-LOVING NEW YORK CITY IN THE 1880s, AND HIS DOOMED MISSION TO WIPE OUT VICE
In the 1890s, New York City was America’s financial, manufacturing, and entertainment capital, and...
A Slave in the White House
Paul Jennings and the Madisons
Language: English
Release Date: January 3, 2012
Paul Jennings was born into slavery on the plantation of James and Dolley Madison in Virginia, later becoming part of the Madison household staff at the White House. Once finally emancipated by Senator Daniel Webster later in life, he would give an aged and impoverished Dolley Madison, his former...
Saint Therese of Lisieux
A Penguin Life
Language: English
Release Date: August 18, 2003
Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, largely unknown when she died in a Carmelite convent at the age of twenty-four, became-through her posthumously published autobiography-one of the world's most influential religious figures. In Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, bestselling novelist and memoirist Kathryn Harrison,...
We Two
Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals
Language: English
Release Date: May 19, 2009
**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
"[A] delectable double bio . . . Talk about Victoria’s secret. . . . A fascinating portrait of a genuine love match, but one in which the partners dealt with surprisingly modern issues.”
—USA Today**
It was the most influential marriage of the nineteenth...
Travels in North America, 1832–1834
A Concise Edition of the Journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied
Language: English
Release Date: February 8, 2017
The journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied rank among the most important firsthand sources documenting the early-nineteenth-century American West. Published in their entirety as an annotated three-volume set, the journals present a complete narrative of Maximilian’s expedition across the United States,...
Strong Boy
The Life and Times of John L. Sullivan, America's First Sports Hero
Language: English
Release Date: November 5, 2013
“I can lick any son-of-a-bitch in the world.”
So boasted John L. Sullivan, the first modern heavyweight boxing champion of the world, a man who was the gold standard of American sport for more than a decade, and the first athlete to earn more than a million dollars. He had a big ego,...
by H. W. Brands
Language: English
Release Date: October 12, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: October 12, 2010
In a grand-scale narrative history, the bestselling author of two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize now captures the decades when capitalism was at its most unbridled and a few breathtakingly wealthy businessmen utterly transformed America from an agrarian economy to a world power.
The years...
The Robber Barons
The Classic Account of the Influential Capitalists Who Transformed America's Future
Language: English
Release Date: October 27, 2015
“The best, the liveliest and most illuminating” account of Rockefeller, Morgan, and the other men who seized American economic power after the Civil War (The New Republic).
John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, E. H. Harriman, Jay Gould, Henry Clay Frick . . ....
Barons of the Sea
And Their Race to Build the World's Fastest Clipper Ship
Language: English
Release Date: July 17, 2018
“A fascinating, fast-paced history…full of remarkable characters and incredible stories” about the nineteenth-century American dynasties who battled for dominance of the tea and opium trades (Nathaniel Philbrick, National Book Award-winning author of In the Heart of the Sea).
There was...
Mastering Iron
The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800-1868
Language: English
Release Date: January 15, 2013
Veins of iron run deep in the history of America. Iron making began almost as soon as European settlement, with the establishment of the first ironworks in colonial Massachusetts. Yet it was Great Britain that became the Atlantic world’s dominant low-cost, high-volume producer of iron, a position...