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History - American — page 11
1,087 public-domain history - american books, summarised. Page 11 of 23.

When the Word is Given...: A Report on Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Black Muslim World
Louis E. Lomax
The Black Muslim movement emerges here as both a fierce critique of American Christianity and a volatile force in the fight for racial justice. Through direct reporting and candid interviews, the book captures a pivotal moment when the Nation of Islam demanded a radical, separate future for Black Americans.

Ancient Rome and Modern America
Guglielmo Ferrero
The restless energy of the machine age and the measured wisdom of antiquity collide in these reflections, offering a sobering look at what humanity sacrifices in its frantic pursuit of progress.

The History of Ancient America, Anterior to the Time of Columbus: Proving the Identity of the Aborigines with the Tyrians and Israelites
George Jones
The ancient civilizations of the Americas were not truly "new" discoveries, but the historical descendants of Tyrian and Israelite voyagers who crossed the Atlantic long before Columbus.

The Secrets of the Great City: A Work Descriptive of the Virtues and the Vices, the Mysteries, Miseries and Crimes of New York City
James Dabney McCabe
This panoramic study of mid-nineteenth-century New York exposes the stark friction between the city’s soaring commercial ambition and the entrenched corruption lurking within its bustling streets. It captures a metropolis defined as much by its grand potential as by its systemic moral decay.

The American Missionary
Various
This publication serves as a window into the expansive, turn-of-the-century mission network that sought to reshape American society through education, evangelism, and the legacy of Abraham Lincoln.

The Great Riots of New York, 1712 to 1873
Joel Tyler Headley
New York City’s history is scarred by eruptions of violence, from colonial-era panics to the bloody urban warfare of the mid-19th century. This chronicle documents the repeated failure of civil order and the brutal costs of restoring it.

The journal of the American-Irish Historical Society, Vol. I, 1898
Various
This inaugural volume documents the earnest founding and early intellectual pursuits of an organization dedicated to recovering the historical contributions of the Irish race in the United States. It stands as both a record of late 19th-century institutional formation and a defiant manifesto against what its…

The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation
Richard Hakluyt
The world expands through the eyes of those who dared to sail beyond the known horizon. This vast collection preserves the firsthand accounts of the Elizabethan age’s most ambitious maritime explorers.

The vigilantes of Montana
Thos. J. (Thomas Josiah) Dimsdale
A bloody, eyewitness record of the 1860s gold rushes, where lawless outlaws ruled the trail and armed citizens formed secretive committees to hang them.

Tragedy in Dedham
Francis Russell
A payroll robbery turns into a seven-year legal battle that exposes the fault lines of a nation.

Webster's Seventh of March Speech and the Secession Movement, 1850
Herbert Darling Foster
The American Union stood at the brink of collapse in 1850, saved not by inevitability, but by a single, divisive oratorical gamble that forced a fractured nation to pause.

Company B, 307th Infantry: Its history, honor roll, company roster, Sept., 1917, May, 1919
Julius Klausner
A raw, unvarnished record of American civilians transformed into a frontline infantry unit captures the relentless machinery of World War I, tracing a journey from Long Island training grounds to the deadly thickets of the Argonne.

The party battles of the Jackson period
Claude G. (Claude Gernade) Bowers
American democracy in the Thirties is forged not in quiet halls of consensus, but in the white-hot crucible of partisan fury.

U.S. Marine Operations in Korea, 1950-1953, Volume 4 (of 5): The East-Central Front
Lynn Montross
In the frozen mountains of Korea, Marines transformed military doctrine, testing armored vests and helicopter assaults while fighting through an agonizing stalemate.

The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine (May 1913): Vol. LXXXVI. New Series: Vol. LXIV. May to October, 1913
Various
An expansive canvas of early twentieth-century American thought, literature, and social reform captures a culture poised on the threshold of the modern world.

The Navy of the American Revolution
Charles Oscar Paullin
Behind the daring sea battles of the American Revolution lay a chaotic, improvised bureaucratic machine struggling to build, equip, and direct a navy from scratch.

Pictorial history of the war for the Union, volume 1 (of 2)
Ann S. (Ann Sophia) Stephens
Written from the immediate, electric edge of an unfolding crisis, this contemporary chronicle documents the opening year of the American Civil War with raw urgency, capturing a nation suddenly fracturing into fire, dust, and blood.

The American Missionary
Various
A monthly record of Northern Christian philanthropy during Reconstruction, capturing the urgent, unvarnished efforts to establish schools and churches for newly freed African Americans and marginalized populations across the American South.

The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn
William Benjamin Smith
A passionate argument for racial segregation, rooted in controversial scientific and historical claims.

Scenes and Adventures in the Semi-Alpine Region of the Ozark Mountains of Missouri and Arkansas
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
Two wilderness travellers push into the untamed Ozark highlands of 1818, tracking the forgotten paths of Spanish explorers through rugged cliffs, hidden caverns, and uncharted river valleys.

Under the Prophet in Utah
Frank J. Cannon
A powerful religious hierarchy bargains its way into the American republic, trading solemn promises of reform for statehood—only to betray those pledges and establish a secretive political and financial tyranny over its devoted followers.

The Battle for Khe Sanh
Moyers S. Shore
Encircled in the remote western highlands of Vietnam, a single garrison of Marines faces two full enemy divisions in a high-stakes battle of attrition that becomes a focal point of the war.

The Missouri Persecutions
B. H. (Brigham Henry) Roberts
When religious exile turns into state-sanctioned violence, justice becomes a matter of raw survival. This historical account details the brutal expulsion of early Latter-day Saints from Missouri, documenting a tragedy of broken laws, political cowardice, and unyielding faith.

When the West was young
Frederick R. (Frederick Ritchie) Bechdolt
A landscape of searing deserts and mountain strongholds frames a rugged chronicle of human grit, where lawmen, outlaws, and indigenous leaders fight to shape a wild, vast frontier.

After the War: A Southern Tour. May 1, 1865 to May 1, 1866
Whitelaw Reid
Traversing thousands of miles across a ruined Confederacy in the immediate wake of the Civil War, a sharp-eyed Northern journalist documents a landscape where bitter defeat, desperate opportunism, and fragile freedom collide.

The Story of the Pony Express
Glenn D. (Glenn Danford) Bradley
Across nearly two thousand miles of uninhabited prairies, deserts, and mountain passes, horse and rider carried the mail in a desperate race to connect a dividing nation before it fractured completely.

What Prohibition Has Done to America
Fabian Franklin
When a nation elevates a mere police regulation above its own fundamental charter, it trades the enduring dignity of free government for the fleeting, tyrannical impulses of a organized statutory crusade.

American Unitarian Hymn Writers and Hymns
Henry Wilder Foote
A quiet revolution transforms American worship as formal theological dogmas yield to personal conscience, literary beauty, and moral imperative.

History of the Ordinance of 1787 and the Old Northwest Territory: A Supplemental Text for School Use
Unknown
A foundational act of legislation shaped the American wilderness into self-governing states while forever banning slavery across a vast frontier.

Portage Paths: The Keys of the Continent
Archer Butler Hulbert
Narrow carrying paths across the ridge lines of North America once decided the fates of empires, armies, and wilderness trade.

The Fugitive Slave Law and Its Victims: Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 18
Samuel May
An oppressive federal statute transforms free soil into a hunting ground, forcing desperate human beings to choose between violent resistance, tragic self-sacrifice, or a return to bondage.

The Hearth-Stone: Thoughts Upon Home-Life in Our Cities
Samuel Osgood
A thoughtful study of how urban homes can become sanctuaries of stability, virtue, and emotional connection in a rapidly changing modern society.

An American Diplomat in China
Paul S. (Paul Samuel) Reinsch
A firsthand account of China’s turbulent transition from imperial rule to a fragile republic, seen through the eyes of an American diplomat navigating the shifting tides of international power during the Great War.

Our Schools in War Time—and After
Arthur D. (Arthur Davis) Dean
The nation must transform itself into a unified team, and the schoolhouse stands as the primary engine for this national mobilization. This pragmatic guide examines how education pivoted during the Great War to serve the home front.

The Nation's Peril.: Twelve Years' Experience in the South. Then and Now. The Ku Klux Klan, a Complete Exposition of the Order: Its Purpose, Plans, Operations, Social and Political Significance
Anonymous
The political landscape of the Reconstruction era serves as the backdrop for this urgent, polemical examination of the violence and intimidation orchestrated by the Ku Klux Klan to subvert the post-Civil War order.

The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years' Work Among Them
Charles Loring Brace
This nineteenth-century chronicle offers an urgent, firsthand account of the struggle to rescue New York City’s neglected youth from a cycle of poverty and criminality. It serves as a foundational text in the history of American social reform.

A brief narrative of the Fourth Tennessee Cavalry Regiment, Wheeler's Corps, Army of Tennessee
George B. Guild
The remnants of a cavalry unit recount their service, moving from the excitement of initial mobilization to the quiet, melancholy reflections of men who have outlived their cause.

Civil Government in the United States Considered with Some Reference to Its Origins
John Fiske
This foundational text explores the historical evolution and practical mechanics of the American political system, framing the government as a living institution built upon centuries of English precedent.

Introductory American History
Henry Eldridge Bourne
The journey to America begins not on the Atlantic, but in the ruins of ancient temples and the harbors of the Mediterranean, where the foundations of Western civilization were first laid.

Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 101, May, 1876
Various
This collection captures the expansive curiosity of 1876, blending the industrial optimism of a world’s fair with the intimate, often turbulent lives of characters caught in the sweep of social and emotional change.

My Native Land: The United States: its Wonders, its Beauties, and its People
James Cox
The vast American landscape, from the Atlantic shore to the Pacific coast, unfolds as a mosaic of history, folklore, and frontier struggle in this sweeping, early twentieth-century survey.

My Second Year of the War
Frederick Palmer
A panoramic, firsthand account of the British and French offensives on the Somme, capturing the mechanical fury and human resilience of the Great War’s central struggle.

The American Missionary
Various
This collection of reports from 1896 offers a candid, firsthand window into the social and spiritual priorities of the American Missionary Association at the close of the nineteenth century. It serves as a primary historical record of the era’s organized religious outreach.

The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812: The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17
Ralph Delahaye Paine
This chronicle recounts the maritime struggle and land campaigns of the War of 1812, emphasizing the pivotal role of the American navy in securing national dignity when the army’s early efforts faltered.

Unique Ghost Towns and Mountain Spots
Caroline Bancroft
This guidebook traverses the rugged, high-altitude remnants of Colorado’s mining era, blending historical accounts with the quiet, evocative atmosphere of towns left to the elements.

The Continental Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 2, February, 1862: Devoted To Literature And National Policy
Various
This collection of mid-Civil War discourse serves as a living archive of a nation mid-struggle, blending urgent political policy with the literary pulse of 1862.

The German Secret Service in America 1914-1918
John Price Jones
The shadow of a foreign power once stretched across American soil, turning peaceful neighborhoods into battlegrounds for a global intelligence war. This account reveals how imperial agents attempted to sabotage the foundations of a nation long before it officially entered the conflict.

The History of Virginia, in Four Parts
Robert Beverley
An insider’s account of colonial Virginia, this work offers a vivid, multifaceted look at the land, its native inhabitants, and the volatile political climate of the seventeenth century. It serves as both a historical record and a spirited defense of the colony’s character against external misrepresentation.