DIVDee Brown’s sparkling account of a momentous year in American history/divDIV In 1876, America was eager to celebrate its centenary, but questioned what might lie ahead. The American Republic had grown to four times its original population, and was in the midst of enormous changes. Industrialization was booming, and new energy sources were being used for fuel and power. People were suddenly less bound to agriculture, and there were revolutions in transportation and communication. It was a time of Indian wars, the first stirrings of the labor movement, and the burgeoning struggle form women’s and other civil rights. Historian Dee Brown takes the measure of America in a rare moment of reflection on the nation’s past, present, and future. /divDIV /divDIVThe Year of the Century was one of Brown’s favorites among his works. In page-turning prose, he tells of a tumultuous era and of a young nation taking stock./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Dee Brown including rare photos from the author’s personal collection./div

In this major work of popular history and scholarship, acclaimed historian and biographer Roy Morris, Jr., tells the extraordinary story of how, in America's centennial year, the presidency was stolen, the Civil War was almost reignited, and black Americans were consigned to nearly ninety years of legalized segregation in the South. The bitter 1876 contest between Ohio Republican governor Rutherford B. Hayes and New York Democratic governor Samuel J. Tilden is the most sensational, ethically sordid, and legally questionable presidential election in American history. The first since Lincoln's in 1860 in which the Democrats had a real chance of recapturing the White House, the election was in some ways the last battle of the Civil War, as the two parties fought to preserve or overturn what had been decided by armies just eleven years earlier. Riding a wave of popular revulsion at the numerous scandals of the Grant administration and a sluggish economy, Tilden received some 260,000 more votes than his opponent. But contested returns in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina ultimately led to Hayes's being declared the winner by a specially created, Republican-dominated Electoral Commission after four tense months of political intrigue and threats of violence. President Grant took the threats seriously: he ordered armed federal troops into the streets of Washington to keep the peace. Morris brings to life all the colorful personalities and high drama of this most remarkable -- and largely forgotten -- election. He presents vivid portraits of the bachelor lawyer Tilden, a wealthy New York sophisticate whose passion for clean government propelled him to the very brink of the presidency, and of Hayes, a family man whose midwestern simplicity masked a cunning political mind. We travel to Philadelphia, where the Centennial Exhibition celebrated America's industrial might and democratic ideals, and to the nation's heartland, where Republicans waged a cynical but effective "bloody shirt" campaign to tar the Demo-crats, once again, as the party of disunion and rebellion. Morris dramatically recreates the suspenseful events of election night, when both candidates went to bed believing Tilden had won, and a one-legged former Union army general, "Devil Dan" Sickles, stumped into Republican headquarters and hastily improvised a devious plan to subvert the election in the three disputed southern states. We watch Hayes outmaneuver the curiously passive Tilden and his supporters in the days following the election, and witness the late-night backroom maneuvering of party leaders in the nation's capital, where democracy itself was ultimately subverted and the will of the people thwarted. Fraud of the Century presents compelling evidence that fraud by Republican vote-counters in the three southern states, and especially in Louisiana, robbed Tilden of the presidency. It is at once a masterful example of political reporting and an absorbing read.

Excerpt from The Century, 1876, Vol. 11 Beauty for ashes thou hast brought me, dear! A time there was when all my soul lay waste, As the earth dark before the dawning lies Whereto the golden feet of morn make haste. Like morn thou comest, gladness in thine eyes, And gracious pity round thine ardent mouth Like rain of summer upon wasted lands, Thy tender tears refreshed my Spirit's drouth. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The third volume of Gore Vidal's magnificent series of historical novels aimed at demythologizing the American past, 1876 chronicles the political scandals and dark intrigues that rocked the United States in its centennial year. ------Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, Aaron Burr's unacknowledged son, returns to a flamboyant America after his long, self-imposed European exile. The narrator of Burr has come home to recoup a lost fortune by arranging a suitable marriage for his beautiful daughter, the widowed Princess d'Agrigente, and by ingratiating himself with Samuel Tilden, the favored presidential candidate in the centennial year. With these ambitions and with their own abundant charms, Schuyler and his daughter soon find themselves at the centers of American social and political power at a time when the fading ideals of the young republic were being replaced by the excitement of empire. ------"A glorious piece of writing," said Jimmy Breslin in Harper's. "Vidal can take history and make it powerful and astonishing." Time concurred: "Vidal has no peers at breathing movement and laughter into the historical past." ------With a new Introduction by the author.

The Gilded Age--the name Mark Twain coined to refer to the period of rapid economic growth in America between the 1870s and 1900--is in the air again! Noted historian Alan Axelrod explores "this intense era in all its dimensions," looking at how the "overture of the American Century" presaged our own time. Photographs, political cartoons, engravings, and other ephemera help bring this fascinating period into focus.

A milestone in American cultural history, the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia was one of the most broadly shared, heavily attended, and thoroughly documented public experiences of the nineteenth century. Power and Posterity illuminates how the art featured in the celebration informed and reflected national debates over the country's identity and its role in the world. The Centennial's fine arts display, which included both a government-sanctioned selection of American works and significant contributions from sixteen other countries, spurred a transformation in the American art world. Drawing from official records, published criticism, guidebooks, poems, and satire, Kimberly Orcutt provides a nuanced, in-depth study of the exhibition. She considers the circumstances of the artworks' creation, the ideological positions expressed through their installation, and the responses of critics, collectors, and the general public as they evolved from antebellum nationalism to a postwar cosmopolitanism in which artists and collectors took the international stage. Orcutt reveals how the fair democratized the fine arts, gave art criticism newfound reach and authority, and led art museums to proliferate across the country. Deeply researched, thoughtfully written, and featuring a mix of more than eighty full-color and black-and-white illustrations, this thorough and insightful book will appeal to those interested in American culture and history, the art world, and world's fairs and exhibitions in Philadelphia and beyond.