In his 1965 study Prelude to Civil War, one of the most distinguished historians of the Civil War era William Freehling, painted a vivid picture of a pivotal early sectional crisis between the North and the South: the Nullification Controversy of 1832-3. The crisis pitted President Andrew Jackson and the Union against John C. Calhoun and the most extreme southern state, South Carolina.
One of the world's leading scholars of slavery and abolitionism, David Brion Davis reflected upon the influences and impact of his 1966 work The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. This study examined the various ways that different cultures responded to the contradictions of slavery from antiquity to the early 1770s.
In 1982, William S. McFeely won the Pulitzer and Francis Parkman prizes for his book Grant: A Biography (W.W. Norton, 1981). This seminal biography of one of America's towering and enigmatic figures traced Grant's entire life from his birth in 1822 through his boyhood in Ohio to the battlefields of the Civil War and his presidency during the crucial years of Reconstruction and finally his heroic battle with cancer and death in 1885. McFeely's work is a penetrating examination of Grant's successes and failures and his extraordinary ordinariness.
One of the foremost shapers of the new history of American slavery, Leon Litwack discussed his book, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979).
The book A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 quickly became a model of social history when it was published in 1990. The book examines the life of one Maine midwife and provides a vivid examination of ordinary life in the early American republic, including the role of women in the household and local market economy, the nature of marriage, sexual relations, family life, aspects of medical practice, and the prevalence of crime and violence. The book won many awards including the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Bancroft Prize.
The true scale of paper production in America from 1690 through the end of the nineteenth century was staggering, with a range of parties participating in different ways, from farmers growing flax to textile workers weaving cloth and from housewives saving rags to peddlers collecting them.
The sale of authors’ papers to archives has become big news, with collections from James Baldwin and Arthur Miller fetching record-breaking sums in recent years. Amy Hildreth Chen offers the history of how this multimillion dollar business developed from the mid-twentieth century onward and considers what impact authors, literary agents, curators, archivists, and others have had on this burgeoning economy.
Twenty-first-century culture is obsessed with books. In a time when many voices have joined to predict the death of print, books continue to resurface in new and unexpected ways. From the proliferation of “shelfies” to Jane Austen–themed leggings and from decorative pillows printed with beloved book covers to bookwork sculptures exhibited in prestigious collections, books are everywhere and are not just for reading. Writers have caught up with this trend: many contemporary novels depict books as central characters or fetishize paper and print thematically and formally.
Print culture expanded significantly in the nineteenth century due to new print technologies and more efficient distribution methods, providing literary critics, who were alternately celebrated and reviled, with an ever-increasing number of venues to publish their work. Adam Gordon embraces the multiplicity of critique in the period from 1830 to 1860 by exploring the critical forms that emerged.