The true history of a legendary American folk heroIn the 1820s, a fellow named Sam Patch grew up in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, working there (when he wasn't drinking) as a mill hand for one of America's new textile companies. Sam made a name for himself one
A quarter-century after its first publication, A Shopkeeper's Millennium remains a landmark work--brilliant both as a new interpretation of the intimate connections among politics, economy, and religion during the Second Great Awakening, and as a surprisi
David Walker's Appeal is a landmark work of American history and letters, the most radical piece of writing by an African American in the nineteenth century. Startling in its intensity, unrelenting in its attacks on slavery and white racism, it alarmed So
Praised by Robbie Robertson of The Band as "a classic a ticket to ride," The Rose the Briar assembles an astonishing group of writers and artists: Paul Muldoon, Stanley Crouch, R. Crumb, Jon Langford of the Mekons, Sharyn McCrumb, Luc Sante, Joyce Carol O
The towering figure who remade American politics—the champion of the ordinary citizen and the scourge of entrenched privilegeThe Founding Fathers espoused a republican government, but they were distrustful of the common people, having designed a constit
The Republican efficiency expert whose economic boosterism met its match in the Great DepressionCatapulted into national politics by his heroic campaigns to feed Europe during and after World War I, Herbert Hoover—an engineer by training—exemplified t
Since its publication in 1984, Chants Democratic has endured as a classic narrative on labor and the rise of American democracy. In it, Sean Wilentz explores the dramatic social and intellectual changes that accompanied early industrialization in New York
With searing wit and incisive commentary, John Kenneth Galbraith redefined America's perception of itself in The New Industrial State, one of his landmark works. The United States is no longer a free-enterprise society, Galbraith argues, but a structured
In 1960, Barry Goldwater set forth his brief manifesto in The Conscience of a Conservative. Written at the height of the Cold War and in the wake of America's greatest experiment with big government, the New Deal, Goldwater's message was not only remarkab