This book explores the fascinating and puzzling world of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American elections. It examines the strategic behavior of nineteenth-century party politicians and shows how their search for electoral victory led them to invent a number of remarkable campaign practices. Why were parties dedicated to massive voter mobilization? Why did presidential nominees wage front-porch campaigns? Why did officeholders across the country tie their electoral fortunes to the popularity of presidential candidates at the top of the ticket? Erik J. Engstrom and Samuel Kernell demonstrate that the defining features of nineteenth-century electoral politics were the product of institutions in the states that prescribed how votes were cast and how those votes were converted into political offices. Relying on a century's worth of original data, this book uncovers the forces propelling the nineteenth-century electoral system, its transformation at the end of the nineteenth century, and the implications of that transformation for modern American politics.

This volume represents one of the first efforts to harvest the rapidly emerging scholarship in the field of American rural history. Building on the insights and methodologies that social historians have directed toward urban life, the contributors explore the past as it unfolded in the rural settings in which most Americans have lived during most of American history. The essays cover a broad range of topics: the character and consequences of manufacturing and consumerism in the antebellum countryside of the Northeast; the transition from slavery to freedom in Southern plantation and nonplantation regions; the dynamics of community-building and inheritance among Midwestern native and immigrant farmers; the panorama of rural labor systems in the Far West; and the experience of settled farming communities in periods of slowed economic growth. The central theme is the complex and often conflicting development of commercial and industrial capitalism in the American countryside. Together the essays place rural societies within the context of America's "Great Transformation."

This is a book about the reality of place in America, the events and influences that led to the America we recognize today. It is a book about the growth of American cities and their suburbs during the twentieth century, about institutions and metropolitan governance, about real estate development and finance, about housing and the lack of it, about the emergence and perhaps the eventual debilitation of cities and suburbs alike. Incorporating the thinking of visionary city planners and land use economists, the author presents a lucid primer on the economics of land, its development and usage, and on how things actually get done in the real estate industry.

U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.

The twentieth anniversary edition of the classic architectural study of the development of the connected farm buildings made by 19th-century New Englanders, which offers insight into the people who made them.

This book aims both to demystify and to reconstitute 'Hawthorne' as an object of study by rereading Hawthorne's fictions, mainly those from the early 1840's to 1860, in the context of the emergence of a distinctively middle-class personal life (the domestic emotional revolution that accompanied the industrial revolution. Recent histories of middle-class private life, gender, the body, and sexuality now enable us to bring a more encompassing grasp of history to our reading of the 'psychological' in Hawthorne's writing. Rather than taking the conventional view that Freud explains Hawthorne's psychological themes, the author draws on the history of personal life to suggest that mid-century psychological fictions help, historically, to account for the surfacing of a bourgeois Freudian discourse later in the century. The production of Personal Life also asks why it was that women in mid-century fiction, especially that written by men, were represented as psychological targets of male monomaniacs in the home. By connecting the enforcement of middle-class 'feminine' roles to psychological tension between the sexes, Hawthorne's fiction at times implicitly critiques the sentimental construction of gender roles on which the economic and cultural ascendancy of his class relied.

This book synthesizes Marxian theory with the existing historical literature to produce a new analysis of the origins of capitalism in the US and the social roots of the US Civil War.

Social origins study about the employment of women in the mills(1826-1860) enabled women to enjoy social and independence unknown to their mothers' generation.