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History - American — page 20
1,154 public-domain history - american books, summarised. Page 20 of 25.
The Invasion of America: a fact story based on the inexorable mathematics of war
J. W. (Julius Washington) Muller
A hypothetical invasion of the American coast exposes a nation’s fatal lack of military preparation, forcing a confrontation with the cold, mathematical reality of modern warfare.
The Migrations of an American Boat Type
Howard Irving Chapelle
The sharpie is a triumph of North American boat design, a humble oyster skiff that transformed from a local labor-saving tool into a regional icon of speed and seaworthiness.
The Olden Time Series, Vol. 1: Curiosities of the Old Lottery: Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts
Henry M. (Henry Mason) Brooks
This volume captures the vanished world of early American lotteries, revealing how a widespread gambling habit was once woven into the foundational fabric of New England’s civic and social life.
The Story of Bacon's Rebellion
Mary Newton Stanard
In 1676, a charismatic young Englishman ignited a volatile uprising against Virginia’s colonial establishment, challenging both the aging governor and the established order of the New World.
The Winning of the West, Volume 3: The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790
Theodore Roosevelt
The young nation’s survival depends on the unruly, rifle-bearing frontiersmen who claim the western woods. Amidst broken treaties, brutal skirmishes, and shifting allegiances, these pioneers test whether a democracy can expand without shattering into pieces.
Church work among the Negroes in the South: The Hale Memorial Sermon No. 2
Robert Strange
An urgent, early-twentieth-century plea for structural reform in the Episcopal Church, this sermon examines how white and Black Southerners might relate to one another within a shared Christian institution during a period of escalating Jim Crow segregation.
Discussion on American Slavery
George Thompson
Two fiery debaters clash across five tense evenings in Scotland, locking horns over the moral guilt of American slaveholders, the mechanics of gradual emancipation, and the true motives behind African colonization.
Lectures on the Philosophy and Practice of Slavery: As Exhibited in the Institution of Domestic Slavery in the United States, with the Duties of Masters to Slaves
William A. (William Andrew) Smith
A Southern college president delivers a rigorous defense of domestic servitude, grounding human inequality in natural law, scriptural decree, and the conservative preservation of the American republic.
The crisis
Various
A vital historical document captures the early twentieth-century struggle for Black civil rights through journalism, critical essays, political reports, and community announcements.
The Great Fortress
William Wood
A lone stone citadel on the fog-shrouded shores of Cape Breton holds the key to an empire, serving as the sole Atlantic gateway between France and its vast American wilderness.
The Rise and Fall of Anarchy in America: From its Incipient Stage to the First Bomb Thrown in Chicago
George N. McLean
A city gripped by economic strife becomes a powder keg when radical labor rhetoric meets the unyielding authority of the law.
U.S. Marines In Vietnam, Volume 1 (of 9)
Robert H. Whitlow
Before heavy combat units arrived, a small contingent of American advisors and helicopter crews quietly built the foundation of the Marine presence in Southeast Asia.
Canada in Flanders, Volume I
Beaverbrook, Max Aitken, Baron
A swift mobilization across the prairie transforms Canadian civilians into an unyielding frontline force, holding the fate of the Western Front in the muddy trenches of Flanders.
Good housing that pays
Fullerton L. (Fullerton Leonard) Waldo
Urban housing reform can yield solid financial returns while treating working-class tenants with dignity.
History of the War Between Mexico and the United States, with a Preliminary View of its Origin, Volume 1
Brantz Mayer
A study of national ambition and diplomatic failure, this volume traces how deep-seated cultural misunderstandings and political instability transformed border disputes into an open, bloody conflict.
The American Missionary
Various
Against a backdrop of nationwide economic strain, dedicated teachers and ministers quietly build schools, maintain mountain chapels, and carry basic supplies to forgotten communities.
The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 2, February, 1864: Devoted To Literature And National Policy
Various
Beyond the smoke of Civil War battlefields, mid-nineteenth-century America waged an equally fierce conflict of ideas over national identity, historical truth, and the nature of human progress.
The Country-Life Movement in the United States
L. H. (Liberty Hyde) Bailey
A quiet revolution is stirring beyond city boundaries, demanding that rural life be understood on its own terms rather than treated as a mere supplier for urban industrial expansion.
The life savers of Cape Cod
J. W. (John Wilfred) Dalton
A harrowing chronicle of maritime peril, J. W. Dalton’s 1902 history documents the perilous stretches of Massachusetts sand and the disciplined, fearless surfmen who risked their lives to rescue shipwrecked sailors from the Atlantic’s deadliest winter gales.
The Lily and the Totem
William Gilmore Simms
A dream of freedom in the New World dissolves into mutiny, massacre, and a terrible, cold revenge.
A Comic History of the United States
Livingston Hopkins
A dryly irreverent chronicle parodies the grand narrative of American nation-building, transforming monumental historical milestones into a procession of absurd misunderstandings, petty squabbles, and outrageous tall tales.
By the Golden Gate
Joseph Carey
An Eastern clergyman journeys toward the Pacific Ocean, documenting the wonders of the Western landscape and the vibrant, bustling life of early twentieth-century San Francisco.
Captain Richard Ingle: The Maryland "Pirate and Rebel," 1642-1653
Edward Ingle
A merchant captain navigates the volatile boundary between colonial order and Parliamentary rebellion, leaving a disputed legacy across the seventeenth-century Chesapeake.
Journal of Travels From St. Josephs to Oregon: With Observations of That Country, Together With Some Description of California, Its Agricultural Interests, and a Full Description of Its Gold Mines
Riley Root
A painstaking account of the 1848 overland migration, this travelogue records the harsh physical reality of crossing the American frontier on the cusp of the Gold Rush.
Klondyke Nuggets: A Brief Description of the Great Gold Regions in the Northwest
Joseph Ladue
A cold wind blows through every page of this urgent guide, written by the man who built the first house in Dawson City just as the Klondike gold rush began to explode.
Martyria
Augustus C. (Augustus Choate) Hamlin
A former Union army medical inspector conducts a rigorous, scientific examination of the brutal conditions and systemic starvation inflicted upon Federal soldiers held captive within Georgia's infamous Andersonville prison stockade during the Civil War.
Over Here: Impressions of America by a British officer
Hector MacQuarrie
An wounded British officer journeys through wartime America to foster mutual understanding, offering a warm, humorous portrait of a nation preparing for global conflict.
Self-Determining Haiti: Four articles reprinted from The Nation embodying a report of an investigation made for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
James Weldon Johnson
Behind a rhetoric of helpful intervention lies the calculated dismantling of a sovereign neighbor through military force, financial coercion, and systemic administrative overreach.
The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863: Devoted to Literature and National Policy
Various
This Northern Civil War periodical blends patriotic essays, wartime reportage, serialized fiction, and economic manifestos into a passionate defense of the Union.
The Truth About Lynching and the Negro in the South: In Which the Author Pleads That the South Be Made Safe for the White Race
Winfield H. (Winfield Hazlitt) Collins
Examining the historical mechanisms of racial violence, Winfield H. Collins constructs an apology for extrajudicial killings, presenting lynching not as an unchecked lawlessness, but as an inevitable response to the social changes following emancipation.
The Uprising of a Great People: The United States in 1861. to Which is Added a Word of Peace on the Difference Between England the United States
Gasparin, Agénor, comte de
A nation’s moral test arrives not in quiet times, but when the choice between convenience and principle threatens to tear its very foundation apart.
Citizen or subject?
Francis X. Hennessy
A nation built on individual liberty cannot survive when state legislatures seize the exclusive power of the people to surrender human freedom to government control.
Old Ticonderoga, a Picture of the Past: (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales")
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A solitary visitor sits among the weed-grown ruins of a famous frontier fort, letting his imagination summon the vanishing ghosts of Indian warriors, French commanders, and Revolutionary soldiers.
The American Missionary
Various
Through administrative balance sheets, institutional field reports, and quiet personal encounters, a missionary publication captures the sprawling efforts to educate and uplift marginalized populations across post-Civil War America.
The Old Sixth Regiment, Its War Record, 1861-5
Charles K. Cadwell
A soldier’s unvarnished journal records the full trajectory of a Union infantry unit through disease, siegecraft, and the grinding realities of the American Civil War.
The Second War with England, Vol. 2 of 2
Joel Tyler Headley
Reliving the final, brutal campaigns of the War of 1812, this history turns dusty treaties into an intense study of military desperation, political fracturing, and raw human endurance across land and sea.
A Close Encounter: The Marine Landing on Tinian
Richard Harwood
This military history chronicles the meticulously planned amphibious assault on the island of Tinian, a decisive maneuver that provided the U.S. with crucial airfields for the strategic B-29 bombing campaign against mainland Japan.
Charter and Supplemental Charter of the Hudson's Bay Company
Hudson's Bay Company
A single legal grant transforms an unexplored wilderness into a vast commercial empire, establishing the machinery of British colonial trade across North America.
Haiti: Its dawn of progress after years in a night of revolution
John Dryden Kuser
The dawn of progress arrives in Haiti, where a landscape of untapped agricultural wealth struggles to emerge from a long, shadowed history of revolutionary turmoil and internal disorder.
Handbook of Old Burial Hill, Plymouth, Massachusetts
Frank H. Perkins
A quiet walk through a colonial hillside, this guide offers a window into the lives and final resting places of the men and women who shaped early New England.
Social legislation and social activity
American Academy of Political and Social Science
This collection of addresses documents the pivotal turn-of-the-century struggle to reconcile rapid industrial expansion with the fundamental human rights of workers and children.
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 21, July, 1859: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
A mid-nineteenth-century American periodical balances fierce political retrospectives and granular scientific discoveries alongside theatrical drama, literary scholarship, and contemporary art criticism.
The German Spy in America: The Secret Plotting of German Spies in the United States and the Inside Story of the Sinking of the Lusitania
John Price Jones
This account pulls back the veil on the clandestine operations of German agents within the United States during the early years of the First World War. It serves as a vital historical snapshot of a nation grappling with subversion on its own soil.
The Wars Between England and America
Theodore Clarke Smith
A continuous half-century of political, economic, and military collision shapes the birth of the American republic. The story of its separation from Great Britain is a long narrative of clashing interests, failed compromises, and reluctant conflict.
Trial of C. B. Reynolds For Blasphemy, at Morristown, N. J., May 1887: Defence
Robert Green Ingersoll
The right to speak one’s mind is the most important possession of any human being. When authority attempts to silence an honest voice, the very foundation of liberty is under siege.
Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2: From Lincoln to Garfield, with a Review of the Events Which Led to the Political Revolution of 1860
James Gillespie Blaine
An insider's view of how post-Civil War America rebuilt itself, this history reveals the intense congressional battles, presidential clashes, and legislative maneuvers that redefined national power.
From Fort Henry to Corinth
M. F. (Manning Ferguson) Force
This military history chronicles the pivotal months of early 1862, documenting the strategic maneuvers and brutal engagements that shifted the American Civil War’s momentum toward the Union. It provides a methodical account of how the Western theater was transformed from a stalemate into a series of decisive…
The Call of the World
William E. (William Ellison) Doughty
The world is rapidly changing, and a new era of global connection demands a bold, unified response from the Christian laity to address spiritual and social needs on an unprecedented scale.