Image Crazy
“Pictures are all the go these days. There is a perfect rage for pictures.”This remark by a North Carolina journalist in 1848 neatly distilled what many sensed was overtaking American life. In the...
View ArticleThe Contradictory Revolution
In American Inheritance the historian Edward J. Larson deals with topics that have recently become politically divisive—the Founding Fathers and the American Revolution. He doesn’t explicitly comment...
View ArticleGrant vs. the Klan
How could a slaveholder develop into a determined enforcer of rights for African Americans? The question arises when we consider two recent books on Ulysses S. Grant: John Reeves’s Soldier of Destiny...
View Article‘A Fiendish Fascination’
Antisemitism has appeared in many times and places—and, as David Anthony shows in his informative, unsettling Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature, in many genres. Anthony has...
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The Remarkable Grimkes
Nineteenth-century America teemed with social reformers like the fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who called the Constitution “an agreement with Hell” because of its compromises on slavery....
View ArticleThrongs of Unseen People
When eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln died of typhoid in the White House in February 1862, his parents were devastated. For weeks President Lincoln held solitary grieving sessions every Thursday, the day...
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In the Shadow of Slavery
In How the Word Is Passed, Clint Smith evokes the horrors of slavery, from the discovery of the New World through the Civil War, and the widespread victimization of blacks since then. It’s an...
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He Was No Moses
Library of Congress ‘This Little Boy would persist in handling Books Above His Capacity—and this was the Disastrous Result’; cartoon of Andrew Johnson by Thomas Nast, 1868 Who were America’s worst...
View ArticleWhen Slaves Fled to Mexico
There has long been a fascination with the plight of enslaved Blacks who ran away from southern slaveholders in the decades before the Civil War. Powerful autobiographies by runaways such as Frederick...
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I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do…
F. H. LiebA postcard of Brigham Young and twenty-one of his wives, 1903The Mormon leader Brigham Young had more than fifty wives. Many of them lived in adjacent homes, the Beehive House and the Lion...
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The Popery Panic
HathiTrust‘Mother Abbess Strangling the Infant’; lithograph from the anti-Catholic pamphlet Popery!: As It Was and as It Is, 1845In the early 1830s, the Hôtel-Dieu nunnery in Montreal was reportedly...
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Fine Specimens
Feinberg-Whitman Collection/Library of CongressWalt Whitman and his rebel soldier friend Pete Doyle, Washington, D.C., 1865Americans in the second half of the nineteenth century had no sure prospect of...
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The Slave Owners’ Foreign Policy
A slave family, Savannah, Georgia, early 1860sThe US Civil War was once commonly interpreted as a conflict between a progressive North, industrially strong and committed to a powerful central...
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