973 WOODWAR 1944

Boston three hundred years ago -- A puritan village in 1680 -- A day in a Virginia planter's life (April 1713) -- When New York was young -- Young Mackenzie see the world -- A Georgia town in 1807 -- Susan Pettigrew makes a journey -- Four young men in the gold rush -- Chicago-the young giant -- A cotton mill village in the 1880's -- New York in 1908. 

973.38 MAYER 1996

Belonging to the Army reveals the identity and importance of the civilians now referred to as camp followers, whom Holly A. Mayer calls the forgotten revolutionaries of the War for American Independence. These merchants, contractors, family members, servants, government officers, and military employees provided necessary supplies, services, and emotional support to the troops of the Continental Army. Mayer describes their activities and demonstrates how they made encampments livable communities and played a fundamental role in the survival and ultimate success of the Continental Army. She also considers how the army wanted to be rid of the followers but were unsuccessful because of the civilians' essential support functions and determination to make camps into communities. Instead, the civilians' assimilation gave an expansive meaning to the term "belonging to the army

973.2 VAVER 2011

Most people know that England shipped thousands of convicts to Australia, but few are aware that colonial America was the original destination for Britain's unwanted criminals. In the 18th century, thousands of British convicts were separated from their families, chained together in the hold of a ship, and carried off to America, sometimes for the theft of a mere handkerchief. What happened to these convicts once they arrived in America? Did they prosper in an environment of unlimited opportunity, or were they ostracized by the other colonists? Anthony Vaver tells the stories of the petty thieves and professional criminals who were punished by being sent across the ocean to work on plantations. In bringing to life this forgotten chapter in American history, he challenges the way we think about immigration to early America. The book also includes an appendix with helpful tips for researching individual convicts who were transported to America. 

973.2 COLDHAM 1992

Few colonizing powers can have relied so heavily and consistently on the wholesale deportation of their prison population as did England through two-and-a-half centuries of imperial expansion. By the time America made her Declaration of Independence in 1776, the prisons of England had disgorged some 50,000 of their inmates to the colonies, most of them destined to survive and, with their descendants, to populate the land of their exile. In a story largely untold until now--certainly never told as well--Coldham's groundbreaking study demonstrates once and for all that the recruitment of labor for the American colonies was achieved in large measure through the emptying of English jails, workhouses, brothels, and houses of correction. Supported by a massive array of documentary evidence and first-hand testimony, the book focuses on the emergence and use of transportation as a means of dealing with an unwanted population, dwelling at length on the processes involved, the men charged with the administration of the system of transportation or engaged in transportation as a business, then proceeding with a fascinating look at the transportees themselves, their lives and hapless careers, and their reception in the colonies. 

973.314 JASANOF 2012

This book offers the first global history of the loyalist exodus to Canada, the Caribbean, Sierra Leone, India, and beyond. At the end of the American Revolution, sixty thousand Americans loyal to the British cause fled the United States and became refugees throughout the British Empire. Liberty's Exiles tells their story. This surprising new account of the founding of the United States and the shaping of the post-revolutionary world traces extraordinary journeys like the one of Elizabeth Johnston, a young mother from Georgia, who led her growing family to Britain, Jamaica, and Canada, questing for a home; black loyalists such as David George, who escaped from slavery in Virginia and went on to found Baptist congregations in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone; and Mohawk Indian leader Joseph Brant, who tried to find autonomy for his people in Ontario. Ambitious, original, and personality-filled, this book is at once an intimate narrative history and a provocative analysis that changes how we see the revolution's "losers" and their legacies"

973.22 PHILBRI 2006

From the perilous ocean crossing to the shared bounty of the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrim settlement of New England has become enshrined as our most sacred national myth. Yet, as author Philbrick reveals, the true story of the Pilgrims is much more than the well-known tale of piety and sacrifice; it is a 55-year epic. The Mayflower's religious refugees arrived in Plymouth Harbor during a period of crisis for Native Americans, as disease spread by European fishermen devastated their populations. Initially, the two groups maintained a fragile working relationship. But within decades, New England erupted into King Philip's War, a savage conflict that nearly wiped out colonists and natives alike, and forever altered the face of the fledgling colonies and the country that would grow from them. Philbrick has fashioned a fresh portrait of the dawn of American history--dominated right from the start by issues of race, violence, and religion.

973.24 ROWLAND 1997

Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, first published in 1682, is an English Puritan woman's account of her captivity among Native Americans during Metacom's War (1675-76) in southeastern New England. In this volume, 17 related documents support Rowlandson's text, which is reprinted from the earliest surviving edition of the narrative.

973 FRAZIER v. 1

"White Servitude" is a classic essay written by historian Richard Hofstadter in the collection entitled "The Underside of American History,"   Using primary sources it gives a strong overview of life as an indentured servant in the American colonies.

973.7 BORDEWI 2005

The civil war brought to a climax the country's bitter division. But the beginnings of slavery's denouement can be traced to a courageous band of ordinary Americans, black and white, slave and free, who joined forces to create what would come to be known as the Underground Railroad, a movement that occupies as romantic a place in the nation's imagination as the Lewis and Clark expedition. The true story of the Underground Railroad is much more morally complex and politically divisive than even the myths suggest. Against a backdrop of the country's westward expansion arose a fierce clash of values that was nothing less than a war for the country's soul. Not since the American Revolution had the country engaged in an act of such vast and profound civil disobedience that not only challenged prevailing mores but also subverted federal law.

973.711 FARROW 2006

Complicity reveals the cruel truth about the Triangle Trade of molasses, rum, and slaves that lucratively linked the North to the West Indies and Africa; discloses the reality of Northern empires built on profits from rum, cotton, and ivory and run, in some cases, by abolitionists; and exposes the thousand-acre plantations that existed in towns such as Salem, Connecticut. Here, too, are eye-opening accounts of the individuals who profited directly from slavery far from the Mason-Dixon line including Nathaniel Gordon of Maine, the only slave trader sentenced to die in the United States, who even as an inmate of New York’s infamous Tombs prison was supported by a shockingly large percentage of the city; Patty Cannon, whose brutal gang kidnapped free blacks from Northern states and sold them into slavery; and the Philadelphia doctor Samuel Morton, eminent in the nineteenth-century field of “race science,” which purported to prove the inferiority of African-born black people.

973.7 MARTEN 2004

"The Civil War influenced virtually every aspect of children's lives, and in turn they eagerly incorporated the experience of war into their daily assumptions and activities. In this new contribution to the American Childhoods series, James Marten places the experiences of children living in the North during the Civil War into the larger contexts of economic, political, and cultural developments during the nineteenth century." 
"On the home front, children became almost full-fledged members of their communities in their support of the war effort. They left school to replace absent men on farms and in factories, helped raise funds for hospitals and other soldiers' causes, and volunteered to knit socks, pick lint, and perform other necessary duties. Even as families were torn apart by the war, Mr. Marten notes, family ties grew stronger as Union soldiers filled their letters with love and advice for their children." 

973.7 MARTEN 2007

A view of the war through the eyes of diverse noncombatants. Four parts of this five-part work each deal with Southerners, Northerners, children, and African-Americans. Using both primary and secondary sources, the author shows how daily life and contemporary attitudes differed dramatically depending on one's gender, locale, or race. Part five, "Aftermaths," includes descriptions of the postwar lives of veterans, orphans, and ex-slaves, and concludes with a chapter on the Civil War stories by Ambrose Bierce.

973.77 ADAMS

This study is based on extensive use of primary printed sources such as surgeon's reports, observation of medical people and soldiers and the chaos of a nation coming to grips with an extreme public health crisis due to war and disease.

973.71 FAUST 2008

An illuminating study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and practicalities of death in the face of the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War. During the war, approximately 620,000 soldiers lost their lives. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. This book explores the impact of this enormous death toll from every angle: material, political, intellectual, and spiritual. Historian Faust delineates the ways death changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation and its understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. She describes how survivors mourned and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the slaughter with its belief in a benevolent God, and reconceived its understanding of life after death.

973.71 LOWRY 1994

First study to cover all aspects of sexuality during the Civil War. Based on area original sources, including the soldiers' jokes, songs, letters, and diaries.

973.7082 EGGLEST 2003

When the Civil War broke out, women answered the call for help. They broke away from their traditional roles and served in many capacities, some of them even going so far as to disguise themselves as men and enlist in the army. Estimates of women disguising themselves as men and enlisting range from 400 to 700 and records indicate that approximately 60 women soldiers were known to have been killed or wounded. More than sixty women who fought or who served the Union or Confederacy in other important ways are featured in this work. Among those included are Sarah Thompson, the Union spy and nurse who brought down the famous raider John Hunt Morgan; Elizabeth Van Lew, the Union spy who was instrumental in the success of the largest prison break of the Civil War; Sarah Malinda Blalock, who fought for the Confederacy as a soldier and then for the Union as a guerrilla raider; Dr. Mary Walker, a doctor for the Union and the only woman to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor for her service during the Civil War; and Jennie Hodgers, who had the longest length of service for any woman soldier, was the only woman to receive a soldier's pension and the first woman to vote in Illinois.

973.911 WAGNER 2005

Many of us grew up hearing our parents exclaim 'you are driving me to the poorhouse!' or remember the card in the 'Monopoly' game which says 'Go to the Poorhouse! Lose a Turn!' Yet most Americans know little or nothing of this institution that existed under a variety of names for approximately three hundred years of American history. Surprisingly these institutions variously named poorhouses, poor farms, sometimes almshouses or workhouses, have received rather scant academic treatment, as well, though tens of millions of poor people were confined there, while often their neighbors talked in hushed tones and in fear of their own fate at the 'specter of the poorhouse.' Based on the author's study of six New England poorhouses/poor farms, a hidden story in America's history is presented which will be of popular interest as well as useful as a text in social welfare and social history. While the poorhouse's mission was character reform and 'repressing pauperism,' these goals were gradually undermined by poor people themselves, who often learned to use the poorhouse for their own benefit, as well as by staff and officials of the houses, who had agendas sometimes at odds with the purposes for which the poorhouse was invented.

362.2109 BLY 2013

In 1887 investigative reporter Nellie Bly, posing as 'Nellie Brown,' went undercover to investigate the deplorable conditions of insane asylums. Her memoirs of this event form the basis of Ten days in a mad-house, which forever changed the way the world looks at treatment and housing of the insane.

973.5063 HAYTER 196

This study consists mainly of the numerous experiences of farmers in the process of adjusting a rapidly to changing America in the 19th century. When one investigates the personal activities of these farmers, definite patterns of action and reaction emerge. To begin with, it becomes clear that large numbers of them were experiencing a difficult and sometimes painful process of adjustment. The question before the farmer was whether to accept or reject the emerging commercial system with its "disturbing elements and conflicting values," or resist the new age and remain rooted in a more rural ideology. Most communities, when confronted  with the new industrialism, produced a cleavage between those who opposed, thus creating attitudes and behavior of anxiety, vacillation, nostalgia, and excessive credulity and gullibility - all of which contributed to producing "the troubled farmer."