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Modern American History
American Century Collection
The Papers of Woodrow Wilson
Taking office with a Democrat-held House and Senate, Woodrow Wilson embarked on one of the most important chapters in the Progressive movement, approving the Federal Reserve Act, establishing the Fair Trade Commission, and strongly endorsing the Nineteenth Amendment and women’s right to vote.... More
Presidential Recordings Digital Edition
The online edition of The Presidential Recordings includes hundreds of hours of presidential tapes covering the major issues of the LBJ administration, from the War on Poverty to the Civil Rights Movement to the Vietnam War. Each conversation is fully transcribed and annotated, and accompanied by... More
Averting Doomsday
Arms Control during the Nixon PresidencyIn the controversial legacy of the Nixon presidency, the administration’s effort to curb and control the spread of the world’s weapons of mass destruction is often overlooked. And yet by the time President Nixon left office under the cloud of the Watergate scandal, his actions on this front had... More
Republican Populist
Spiro Agnew and the Origins of Donald Trump’s AmericaTypically a maligned figure in American political history, former vice president Spiro T. Agnew is often overlooked. Although he is largely remembered for his alliterative speeches, attacks on the media and East Coast intellectuals, and his resignation from office in 1973 in the wake of tax evasion... More
Gerrymanders
How Redistricting Has Protected Slavery, White Supremacy, and Partisan Minorities in VirginiaMany are aware that gerrymandering exists and suspect it plays a role in our elections, but its history goes far deeper, and its impacts are far greater, than most realize. In his latest book, Brent Tarter focuses on Virginia’s long history of gerrymandering to uncover its immense influence on the... More
A Little Child Shall Lead Them
A Documentary Account of the Struggle for School Desegregation in Prince Edward County, VirginiaIn the twentieth-century struggle for racial equality, there was perhaps no setting more fraught and contentious than the public schools of the American south. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, in 1951, a student strike for better school facilities became part of the NAACP legal campaign for... More
Segregation's Science
Eugenics and Society in VirginiaBlending social, intellectual, legal, medical, gender, and cultural history, Segregation's Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia examines how eugenic theory and practice bolstered Virginia's various cultures of segregation--rich from poor, sick from well, able from disabled, male from female,... More
The Making of a Racist
A Southerner Reflects on Family, History, and the Slave TradeIn this powerful memoir, Charles Dew, one of America’s most respected historians of the South--and particularly its history of slavery--turns the focus on his own life, which began not in the halls of enlightenment but in a society unequivocally committed to segregation.Dew re-creates the... More
The Uplift Generation
Cooperation across the Color Line in Early Twentieth-Century VirginiaOffering a fresh look at interracial cooperation in the formative years of Jim Crow, The Uplift Generation examines how segregation was molded, not by Virginia’s white political power structure alone but rather through the work of a generation of Virginian reformers across the color line who from... More
Fatal Politics
The Nixon Tapes, the Vietnam War, and the Casualties of ReelectionIn his widely acclaimed Chasing Shadows ("the best account yet of Nixon’s devious interference with Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 Vietnam War negotiations"-- Washington Post), Ken Hughes revealed the roots of the covert activity that culminated in Watergate. In Fatal Politics, Hughes turns to the final... More
Keep On Keeping On
The NAACP and the Implementation of Brown v. Board of Education in VirginiaVirginia was a battleground state in the struggle to implement Brown v. Board of Education, with one of the South’s largest and strongest NAACP units fighting against a program of noncompliance crafted by the state’s political leaders. Keep On Keeping On offers a detailed examination of how African... More
Chasing Shadows
The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of WatergateThe break-in at Watergate and the cover-up that followed brought about the resignation of Richard Nixon, creating a political shockwave that reverberates to this day. But as Ken Hughes reveals in his powerful new book, in all the thousands of hours of declassified White House tapes, the president... More
Woodrow Wilson and the Great War
Reconsidering America's Neutrality, 1914–1917In recent years, and in light of U.S. attempts to project power in the world, the presidency of Woodrow Wilson has been more commonly invoked than ever before. Yet "Wilsonianism" has often been distorted by a concentration on American involvement in the First World War. In Woodrow Wilson and the... More
Scalawag
A White Southerner's Journey through Segregation to Human Rights ActivismScalawag tells the surprising story of a white working-class boy who became an unlikely civil rights activist. Born in 1935 in Richmond, where he was sent to segregated churches and schools, Ed Peeples was taught the ethos and lore of white supremacy by every adult in his young life. That message... More
Letters and Photographs from the Battle Country
The World War I Memoir of Margaret HallIn August 1918 a Massachusetts-born woman named Margaret Hall boarded a transport ship in New York City that would take her across the Atlantic to work with the American Red Cross in France, then in the devastating grips of the First World War. Working at a canteen at a railroad junction close to... More
The Republican Party in the Age of Roosevelt
Sources of Anti-Government Conservatism in the United StatesElliot Rosen's Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Brains Trust focused on the transition from the Hoover administration to that of Roosevelt and the formulation of the early New Deal program. Roosevelt, the Great Depression, and the Economics of Recovery emphasized long-term and structural recovery... More
A Deed So Accursed
Lynching in Mississippi and South Carolina, 1881–1940From the end of Reconstruction to the onset of the civil rights era, lynching was prevalent in developing and frontier regions that had a dynamic and fluid African American population. Focusing on Mississippi and South Carolina because of the high proportion of African Americans in each state... More
Roosevelt, the Great Depression, and the Economics of Recovery
Historians have often speculated on the alternative paths the United Stages might have taken during the Great Depression: What if Franklin D. Roosevelt had been killed by one of Giuseppe Zangara’s bullets in Miami on February 17, 1933? Would there have been a New Deal under an administration led by... More
Elusive Equality
Desegregation and Resegregation in Norfolk's Public SchoolsIn Elusive Equality, Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Charles H. Ford place Norfolk, Virginia, at the center of the South's school desegregation debates, tracing the crucial role that Norfolk’s African Americans played in efforts to equalize and integrate the city’s schools. The authors relate how local... More
The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers
The Human Rights Years, 1949–1952The 311 documents in this second volume of Eleanor Roosevelt’s papers trace her transformation into one of her era’s most prominent spokespersons for democracy, reveal her ongoing maturation as a political force in her own right, and detail the broader impact she had on American politics, the... More
The Educational Legacy of Woodrow Wilson
From College to NationIn The Educational Legacy of Woodrow Wilson, James Axtell brings together essays by eight leading historians and one historically minded political scientist to examine the long, formative academic phase of Wilson’s career and its connection to his relatively brief tenure in politics. Together, the... More
The Big House after Slavery
Virginia Plantation Families and Their Postbellum Domestic ExperimentThe Big House after Slavery examines the economic, social, and political challenges that Virginia planter families faced following Confederate defeat and emancipation. Amy Feely Morsman addresses how men and women of the planter class responded to postwar problems and how their adaptations to life... More
On the Trail of the D.C. Sniper
Fear and the MediaFor a month in the fall of 2002, a series of sniper attacks suddenly dominated the headlines in the nation’s capital. Beginning in the Washington suburbs, these crimes eventually stretched over one hundred miles along I-95 to Richmond. More than a thousand law officers would pursue the perpetrators... More
The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers
The Human Rights Years, 1945-1948"Eleanor Roosevelt once asked, ‘Where do human rights begin? In small places, close to home, so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination.’... More
What Reconstruction Meant
Historical Memory in the American SouthA great deal has been written about southern memory centering on the Civil War, particularly the view of the war as a valiant lost cause. In this challenging new book Bruce Baker looks at a related, and equally important, aspect of southern memory that has been treated by historians only in passing... More