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History - American — page 17
1,154 public-domain history - american books, summarised. Page 17 of 25.

The Wyoming Military Establishment. A History of the Twenty-fourth Regiment of Connecticut Militia: An Address Before the Tioga Point Historical Society, Delivered December 3rd, 1901
Charles Tubbs
The history of the Connecticut settlers in Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley is a tale of forgotten service, where a dedicated militia regiment found itself caught between competing colonial claims and the brutal fires of the American Revolution.

A Half-Century of Conflict - Volume II
Francis Parkman
The map of North America once hung in a delicate balance, where imperial ambitions, indigenous sovereignty, and provincial grit collided in a long, bloody struggle for a continent that neither side truly understood.

America: A history
Robert Mackenzie
This expansive historical survey traces the growth of free institutions across the Americas, framing the development of these nations as an essential, often turbulent education in the spirit of human liberty.

Contemporary American History, 1877-1913
Charles A. (Charles Austin) Beard
This history examines the rapid industrial transformation of the United States, tracing how the shift from a rural, agrarian society to a complex, capitalist powerhouse reshaped the nation’s laws, politics, and social fabric between 1877 and 1913.

Cruise and Captures of the Alabama
Albert M. Goodrich
The Alabama was a ghost that haunted the oceans during the American Civil War, a singular vessel that turned the tide of commerce into a theater of fire and ruin.

Rifles and Riflemen at the Battle of Kings Mountain
United States. National Park Service
The Battle of Kings Mountain was a pivotal, accidental clash that turned the tide of the American Revolution in the South. This account explores how backwoods marksmen overcame a British force through superior skill and resolve.

The Mormon puzzle, and how to solve it
R. W. Beers
This 1887 analysis examines the cultural and political tensions between the United States government and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, seeking a peaceful resolution to what the author calls a national puzzle.

The Third Massachusetts Regiment Volunteer Militia in the War of the Rebellion, 1861-1863
Unknown
A quiet determination echoes through this chronicle of everyday citizens who left their farms, shops, and classrooms to preserve a union, recording their duty from marshy southern battlefields to the post-war reunions of aging comrades.

Notes Geographical and Historical, Relating to the Town of Brooklyn in Kings County on Long-Island
Gabriel Furman
This work chronicles the evolution of Brooklyn from a collection of colonial outposts to a burgeoning village, meticulously documenting the legal struggles and land rights that shaped its early identity.

Oregon Historic Landmarks: Willamette Valley
Daughters of the American Revolution. Oregon Society
Built blockhouse by blockhouse and home by home, the story of the Willamette Valley is the story of early Oregon itself.

A Brief History of the United States
John Bach McMaster
Centuries of continental transformation unfold not through high-flown rhetoric, but through the hard mechanics of human movement, legislative compromises, and raw physical labor.

An Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the Colonies of South Carolina and Georgia, Volume 2
Alexander Hewatt
A rigorous, mid-eighteenth-century chronicle documents how imperial ambition, local trial, and administrative folly shaped the American South.

Green Spring Farm, Fairfax County, Virginia
Ross De Witt Netherton
A quiet piece of land in Fairfax County becomes a lens through which two centuries of American transition, shifting agriculture, and suburban sprawl unfold.

Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885
Various
An autumn day on a Virginia tobacco farm, a stroll through a Belgian schoolyard in the ghost-footsteps of Charlotte Brontë, and a high-stakes romance on a river ferry open a window into the varied reading life of late Victorian America.

The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut
M. Louise (Maria Louise) Greene
M. Louise Greene details Connecticut’s long, steady transition from an uncompromising Puritan church-state to full religious tolerance, tracing how reasonable government, economic shifts, and stubborn dissenters slowly dismantled compulsory church support and political privilege.

The Library Assistant's Manual
Theodore Wesley Koch
A handbook designed for early twentieth-century library workers outlines the principles, history, and daily mechanics required to transform a collection of books into a vibrant civic institution.

Base-ball
John Montgomery Ward
Underneath the modern pageantry of America’s summer pastime lies a rigorous craft built on physical discipline, strategic mind games, and evolving administrative order.

Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2
Bonnycastle, Richard Henry, Sir
An empire's edge comes alive through the eyes of a military surveyor charting a wild, contested land.

Canada in Flanders, Volume III
Roberts, Charles G. D., Sir
A brutal, meticulously recorded chronicle of Canadian soldiers enduring the mud and artillery of the Somme in 1916. It captures modern industrial warfare at its most ruthless and precise.

Experiments in Government and the Essentials of the Constitution
Elihu Root
Constitutional order rests on collective self-restraint, protecting individual liberty against the temporary impulses of passionate majorities.

Pictorial history of the war for the Union, volume 2 (of 2)
Ann S. (Ann Sophia) Stephens
An ambitious, expansive record of the American Civil War written in its immediate wake, this volume balances sweeping campaign histories with vivid battlefield anecdotes. It paints a detailed panorama of the bloody middle and final years of the conflict, charting every major engagement from the 1862 Peninsula and…

School History of North Carolina
John W. (John Wheeler) Moore
Across three centuries of hardship, conflict, and quiet growth, a Southern colony transforms into a self-governing American state.

The Black Hills, Mid-Continent Resort
Albert N. (Albert Nathaniel) Williams
A jagged dome of ancient granite rises above the South Dakota plains, holding centuries of native reverence, frantic gold rushes, and carefully built modern resorts within its shadow.

The Broken Sword
D. Worthington
A Southern plantation family struggles to maintain its ancestral home amid the systemic chaos and social upheaval of post-Civil War Reconstruction.

The Centralia Conspiracy
Ralph Chaplin
Industrial loggers in the Pacific Northwest fight back when an armed mob attempts to destroy their union hall, triggering a deadly town raid and a brutal campaign of vigilante retaliation.

The postal power of Congress: A study in constitutional expansion
Lindsay Rogers
The constitutional grant empowering Congress to establish post offices and post roads has quietly grown into a vast mechanism of federal power.

The Story of Sitka: The Historic Outpost of the Northwest Coast
Clarence Leroy Andrews
An isolated timber outpost on the North Pacific rim becomes the tense crossroads where imperial Russia, indigenous Thlingit clans, and early American enterprise collide.

A Journey to America in 1834
Robert Heywood
A quiet, methodical record of early nineteenth-century travel, this journal observes a rapidly expanding young republic through the exact, unhurried eyes of an English visitor.

Courts, Criminals and the Camorra
Arthur Cheney Train
A hard-headed New York prosecutor pulls back the curtain on early twentieth-century American justice, showing how police routine, press sensationalism, and imported Italian secret societies turn the noble ideal of legal fairness into an unpredictable theater.

Following the Flag, from August 1861 to November 1862, with the Army of the Potomac
Charles Carleton Coffin
A eye-witness view of blood, mud, and military hesitation reveals the grinding reality of the American Civil War's eastern front.

Slavery and the Constitution
William I. (William Ingersoll) Bowditch
Enslaved human beings cannot be held as property without stripping them of literacy, legal marriage, and political rights, a cruelty that the United States Constitution directly protects.

The American Missionary
Various
A monthly dispatch of missionary intelligence, regional field rosters, financial ledgers, and institutional reports capturing the breadth of post-Civil War American Christian benevolence.

The Man in Court
Frederic DeWitt Wells
The machinery of justice often turns legal conflict into an elaborate, theatrical contest that leaves ordinary participants confused and sidelined.

The Mentor: The Contest for North America, Vol. 1, No. 35, Serial No. 35: The Story of America in Pictures
Albert Bushnell Hart
Two European powers once waged a century-and-a-half struggle to master the vast interior of the North American continent. Through wilderness journeys and bloody sieges, that rivalry reshaped the western hemisphere.

The Pre-Columbian Discovery of America by the Northmen: Illustrated by Translations from Icelandic Sagas
B. F. (Benjamin Franklin) DeCosta
A century before Columbus sailed, Icelandic mariners had already mapped the eastern shores of North America, recording their landfalls in vivid, matter-of-fact sagas.

All about the Klondyke gold mines
J. Armoy (John Armoy) Knox
A flash of gold from the frozen North sparks a fever that sweeps across the nation overnight.

Defenseless America
Hudson Maxim
An explosive appeal to the American conscience, this 1915 manifesto warns that unearned wealth and total military unpreparedness invite swift catastrophic conquest.

Saratoga National Historical Park, New York
Francis Wilshin
A brilliantly planned wilderness campaign collapses through miscommunication and stubborn resistance, turning a remote New York plateau into the pivotal battleground of the American Revolution.

The Trial of Aaron Burr
Joseph P. (Joseph Plunkett) Brady
A towering political figure stands accused of high treason, while a sitting president directs the prosecution from afar and a resolute chief justice enforces strict constitutional boundaries inside a packed Virginia courtroom.

With Our Soldiers in France
Sherwood Eddy
Amid the mud and artillery fire of the Western Front, an unseen battle for the souls and sanity of millions of young soldiers rages in the shadows of the trenches.

Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, Vol 1, No. 11, August, 1920: America's Magazine of Wit, Humor and Filosophy
Various
A pocket-sized artifact of Jazz Age irreverence, this 1920 periodical captures the raw, unfiltered appetite of post-war America for snappy humor, Hollywood scandal, combat veteran nostalgia, and unpretentious rural wit.

Colorado—The Bright Romance of American History
F. C. Grable
A vast, untamed wilderness undergoes centuries of Spanish exploration, indigenous defense, military surveying, and pioneer ambition to emerge as a vibrant American state.

The American Missionary
Various
A Christian society’s monthly journal records its work funding Southern schools, West African missions, and Western outposts while making the case for racial equality and moral reform.

The United States Since the Civil War
Charles Ramsdell Lingley
A nation emerging from the Civil War attempts to rebuild its democracy while transforming into a corporate power, navigating class conflicts, party machinery, and world war.

The war against Japan: Pictorial record
Kenneth E. Hunter
A vast ocean becomes a brutal proving ground where men, machines, and harsh geography collide across thousands of miles of isolated islands.

Minnesota and Dacotah
C. C. (Christopher Columbus) Andrews
The vast, untamed reaches of the mid-nineteenth-century American frontier transform before the reader's eyes, revealing a land on the precipice of rapid settlement and profound historical change.

Sir Humphrey Gilbert's Voyage to Newfoundland
Hayes, Edward, active 1602
A harrowing first-hand record of ambition, maritime disaster, and religious conviction, this sixteenth-century narrative captures England's violent, fumbling early steps toward empire.

The Battle of the Big Hole: A History of General Gibbon's Engagement with Nez Percés Indians in the Big Hole Valley, Montana, August 9th, 1877
G. O. (George O.) Shields
A harrowing account of the 1877 military engagement in Montana, this historical narrative details the tactical precision and brutal human cost of the conflict between U.S. forces and the Nez Percé people.