America in the Nineteenth Century proposes a rigorous rethinking of this most formative period in U.S. history. Books in the series will be wide-ranging and eclectic, with an interest in politics at all levels, culture and capitalism, race and slavery, law, gender, the environment, and regional and transnational history. The series aims to expand the scope of nineteenth-century historiography by bringing classic questions into dialogue with innovative perspectives, approaches, and methodologies.
Series Editors:
Brian DeLay
Associate Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley
Steven Hahn
Professor of History, New York University
Amy Dru Stanley
Associate Professor of History, University of Chicago
Staff Editorial Contact:
Robert Lockhart, Senior Editor rlockhar@upenn.edu
Black Reconstruction and Its Legacies in Baltimore, 1865-1920
Dennis Patrick Halpin
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 9781512828788
Pub Date: October 2025
Format: Paperback
248 Pages
Dennis Patrick Halpin argues that Baltimore is key to understanding the trajectory of civil rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. A Brotherhood of Liberty traces the civil rights victories scored by black Baltimoreans that inspired activists throughout the nation and subsequent generations.
Freedom’s Horizon is a transnational history of black abolitionism in Brazil. In the last country to abolish slavery in the Western Hemisphere, enslaved and free Africans and their descendants crafted their visions of liberation by thinking comparatively about the uneven spread of abolition across the Atlantic world.
Black and White Transcendentalists Against Slavery
Peter Wirzbicki
Price: $29.95
ISBN: 9781512826821
Pub Date: November 2024
Format: Paperback
336 Pages
In Fighting for the Higher Law, Peter Wirzbicki explores how important black abolitionists joined famous Transcendentalists to create a political philosophy that fired the radical struggle against American slavery.
Tracing the parallel rise of antislavery movements with working-class demands for economic equality, access to the soil, and the right to the fruits of labor, Sean Griffin shows how labor reformers and radicals made invaluable contributions to the antislavery project in the decades before the Civil War.
American Burial Ground reinterprets the historic touchstone of the Overland Trail as a story of death and Native activism. Emigrant graves became seeds of U.S. possession across the West. In response Native peoples defended their homelands by pointing to their graves as proofs of Indigenous persistence and enduring territorial claims.
Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of "40 acres and a mule"—the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All the While, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction.
Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship
Christopher James Bonner
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 9781512824735
Pub Date: February 2023
Format: Paperback
272 Pages
Examining newpsapers, conventions, public protest meetings, and fugitive slave rescues, Christopher James Bonner highlights a spirited debate among African Americans in the nineteenth century, the stakes of which could determine their place in U.S. society and shape the terms of citizenship for all Americans.
The Black Republic explores the critical but overlooked place of Haiti in black thought in the post-Civil War era. Following emancipation, African American leaders considered Haiti a singular example of black self-governance whose fate was inextricably linked to that of African Americans demanding their own right to self-determination.
Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country, 1730-1865
M. Scott Heerman
Price: $29.95
ISBN: 9780812225174
Pub Date: March 2022
Format: Paperback
248 Pages
The Alchemy of Slavery foregrounds diverse and adaptable slaving practices that masters deployed to build a slave economy in Illinois, innovating in response to antislavery pressures.
The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest
William S. Kiser
Price: $29.95
ISBN: 9780812225020
Pub Date: November 2021
Format: Paperback
280 Pages
Borderlands of Slavery explores how the existence of two involuntary labor systems—Mexican peonage and Indian captivity—in the nineteenth-century Southwest impacted the transformation of America's judicial and political institutions during the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras.
