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In this era of tweets and blogs, it is easy to assume that the self-obsessive recording of daily minutiae is a recent phenomenon. But Americans have been navel-gazing since nearly the beginning of the republic. The daily planner—variously called the daily diary, commercial diary, and portable account book—first emerged in colonial times as a means of telling time, tracking finances, locating the nearest inn, and even planning for the coming winter. They were carried by everyone from George Washington to the soldiers who fought in the Civil War. And by the twentieth century, this document had become ubiquitous in the American home as a way of recording a great deal more than simple accounts. This history of the daily act of self-reckoning explores just how vital these unassuming and easily overlooked stationery staples are to those who use them. From their origins in almanacs and blank books through the nineteenth century and on to the enduring legacy of written introspection, the author has penned a biography of an almost ubiquitous document that has borne witness to American lives in all of their complexity and mundanity.

This book will be the first to offer a comprehensive study of American State capitals. Drawing from a historical geography perspective, it gives an insight into the complex processes leading to the selection of state capitals as well as a first assessment of their subsequent evolution and of their integration to the broader processes of territorial and urban building. The book is divided in three sections. The first addresses state capitals as places of memory and studies the urban fabric as well as their symbolic value. The second section studies the capitals’ selection processes. Searching the most suitable location for a capital revealed the way citizens defined democracy (“the people” seldom had to choose directly), territory (through the multifold concept of centrality), and their relationships with the urban world that was beginning to arise and dominate America. The third section tries to explain the developmental delay of most capitals even with the advent of the knowledge economy which should dwell upon their learned workforce and amenities. After the study of the fate of former capitals (for which heritage plays a large part), the book closes by looking at the real extent of changes in state capitals’ place in today’s United States.

In the months after the end of the Civil War, there was one word on everyone’s lips: redemption. From the fiery language of Radical Republicans calling for a reconstruction of the former Confederacy to the petitions of those individuals who had worked the land as slaves, and to the white supremacists who would bring an end to Reconstruction in the late 1870s, this crucial concept informed the ways in which many people—both black and white, northerner and southerner—imagined the transformation of the American South. This book explores how the violence of a protracted civil war shaped the meaning of freedom and citizenship in the new South. It traces the competing meanings that redemption held for Americans as they tried to come to terms with the war and the changing social landscape. While some imagined redemption from the brutality of slavery and war, others—such as the infamous Ku Klux Klan—sought political and racial redemption for their losses through violence. The book merges studies of race and American manhood with an analysis of post-Civil War American politics to offer insight into the violence of Reconstruction.

As the United States transitioned from a rural nation to an urbanized, industrial giant between the War of 1812 and the early twentieth century, ordinary people struggled over the question of what it meant to be American. Blackface Nation argues that this struggle is especially evident in popular culture and the interplay between two specific strains of music: the songs of middle-class reform and blackface minstrelsy. The songs of middle-class reformers, such as the popular Hutchinson Family Singers, expressed an American identity rooted in communal values, with lyrics focusing on abolition, women’s rights, and socialism. Blackface minstrelsy, which emerged out of an audience-based coalition of Northern business elites, Southern slaveholders, and young, white, working-class men, expressed an identity rooted in authentic masculinity, anti-intellectualism, and white superiority. Blackface performers embodied a form of “love crime” racism, in which vast swaths of the white public adored African Americans who fit blackface stereotypes even as they used those stereotypes to rationalize white supremacy. By the early twentieth century, blackface reigned supreme in American popular culture. The Hutchinsons became increasingly seen as old-fashioned, their songs forgotten. This book elucidates a central irony in American history: much of the music interpreted as black, authentic, and expressive was invented, performed, and enjoyed by people who believed in white superiority. At the same time, music often depicted as white, repressed, and boringly bourgeois was often socially and racially inclusive, committed to reform, and devoted to challenging the immoralities at the heart of America’s capitalist order.

Most scholarship on nineteenth-century America’s transformation into a market society has focused on consumption, romanticized visions of workers, and analysis of firms and factories. Building on but moving past these studies, this book presents a history of family farming, general incorporation laws, mortgage payments, inheritance practices, office systems, and risk management—an inventory of the means by which capitalism became America’s new revolutionary tradition. This multidisciplinary collection of essays argues not only that capitalism reached far beyond the purview of the economy, but also that the revolution was not confined to the destruction of an agrarian past. As business ceaselessly revised its own practices, a new demographic of private bankers, insurance brokers, investors in securities, and start-up manufacturers, among many others, assumed center stage, displacing older elites and forms of property. Explaining how capital became an “ism” and how business became a political philosophy, it brings the economy back into American social and cultural history.

Jane Addams was the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. This biography reveals Addams's early development as a political activist and social philosopher. In this book we observe a powerful mind grappling with the radical ideas of her age, most notably the ever-changing meanings of democracy. The book covers the first half of Addams's life, from 1860 to 1899. The book recounts how Addams, a child of a wealthy family in rural northern Illinois, longed for a life of larger purpose. She broadened her horizons through education, reading, and travel, and, after receiving an inheritance upon her father's death, moved to Chicago in 1889 to co-found Hull House, the city's first settlement house. The book shows vividly what the settlement house actually was—a neighborhood center for education and social gatherings—and describes how Addams learned of the abject working conditions in American factories, the unchecked power wielded by employers, the impact of corrupt local politics on city services, and the intolerable limits placed on women by their lack of voting rights. These experiences transformed Addams. Always a believer in democracy as an abstraction, Addams came to understand that this national ideal was also a life philosophy and a mandate for civic activism by all.

This book tells how women repurposed buildings to make California a better place for children. It starts during the Gold Rush in San Francisco and moves to Oakland, after the transcontinental railroad arrived in 1869. In the gendered mixed economy of social welfare that prevailed in the United States during the nineteenth century, government counted on women to care for needy children and women were eager to oblige. They formed voluntary associations to organize services and acquire property, set up nodes in the charitable landscape, and deliver the interests of children first to the charitable public, then to the heart of government. Charitable institutions for children—often housed in repurposed buildings and run by female volunteers—played a key role in addressing the social ills brought about by industrialization and urbanization, in bringing order to the urban landscape, and creating reserves of public places, freed from speculative development. Affluent, white, Protestant women, joined by Irish Catholics, white working class ethnics, and middle class women of color, opened orphanages, free kindergartens, settlement houses, playgrounds, and day nurseries for an equally diverse group of children. Especial attention is given to politics—of gender and childhood, race and religion, immigration and migration—that informed the creation of the charitable landscape in the nineteenth century, expansion in the Progressive Era and the New Deal, and ruthless destruction after World War II. The magnitude of what was lost in slum clearance is addressed, as the extent to which earlier decisions informed postwar developments.

A city is more than a massing of citizens, a layout of buildings and streets, or an arrangement of political, economic, and social institutions. It is also an infrastructure of ideas, an embodiment of the beliefs, values, and aspirations of the people who created it. This book explores this infrastructure of ideas through an examination of the development of the first successful waterworks systems in Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago between the 1790s and the 1860s. In this period the United States began its rapid transformation from rural to urban. Through an analysis of a broad range of verbal and visual sources, the book shows how the discussion, design, and use of waterworks reveal how Americans framed their conceptions of urban democracy and how they understood the natural and the built environment, individual health and the well-being of society, and the qualities of time and history. As citizens debated matters of thirst, finance, and health, they also negotiated abstract questions of secular and sacred, real and ideal, immanent and transcendent, practical and moral. By examining the place of water in the nineteenth-century consciousness, the book illuminates how city dwellers perceived themselves during the great age of American urbanization. But the book is more than a history of urbanization. It is also a refreshing meditation on water as a necessity, as a resource for commerce and industry, and as an essential—and central—part of how we define our civilization.

In the late 1800s, “Arctic Fever” swept across the nation as dozens of American expeditions sailed north to the Arctic to find a sea route to Asia and, ultimately, to stand at the North Pole. Few of these missions were successful, and many men lost their lives en route. Yet failure did little to dampen the enthusiasm of new explorers or the crowds at home that cheered them on. Arctic exploration, the author of this book argues, was an activity that unfolded in America as much as it did in the wintry hinterland. Paying particular attention to the perils facing explorers at home, the book examines their struggles to build support for the expeditions before departure, defend their claims upon their return, and cast themselves as men worthy of the nation's full attention. In so doing, it paints a portrait of polar voyagers, one that removes them from the icy backdrop of the Arctic and sets them within the tempests of American cultural life. With chronological chapters featuring emblematic Arctic explorers—including Elisha Kent Kane, Charles Hall, and Robert Peary—the book reveals why the North Pole, a region so geographically removed from Americans, became an iconic destination for discovery.

At first glance, evangelical and Gotham seem like an odd pair. What does a movement of pious converts and reformers have to do with a city notoriously full of temptation and sin? This text argues that religion must be considered alongside immigration, commerce, and real estate scarcity as one of the forces that shaped the New York City we know today. The book explores the role of the urban evangelical community in the development of New York between the American Revolution and the Civil War. As developers prepared to open new neighborhoods uptown, evangelicals stood ready to build meetinghouses. As the city's financial center emerged and solidified, evangelicals capitalized on the resultant wealth, technology, and resources to expand their missionary and benevolent causes. When they began to feel that the city's morals had degenerated, evangelicals turned to temperance, Sunday school, prayer meetings, antislavery causes, and urban missions to reform their neighbors. The result of these efforts was Evangelical Gotham—a complicated and contradictory world whose influence spread far beyond the shores of Manhattan.

A Hercules in the Cradle traces the evolution of United States central state capacity in the sphere of fiscal policy and public finance. It demonstrates how within merely a few years after independence, the United States acquired the capacity to raise revenue through taxation and government borrowing. The new nation used this capacity to finance wars and territorial expansion that made the United States the predominant power on the North American Continent. In the first half of the book the creation of a productive fiscal regime and a well-managed public debt, made possibly by the framing and adoption of the Constitution and the institutions and policies adopted by the federal government in the early 1790s, is analyzed. The second half of the book investigates the uses of fiscal and financial powers in three major nineteenth-century wars: the War of 1812, the U.S.-Mexican War, and the Civil War.

From the late nineteenth century until World War II, competing spheres of professional identity and practice redrew the field of history, establishing fundamental differences between the roles of university historians, archivists, staff at historical societies, history teachers, and others. This book takes us from the beginning of this professional shift—when the work of history included not just original research, but also teaching and the gathering of historical materials—to a state of microprofessionalization that continues to define the field today. Drawing on extensive research among the records of the American Historical Association and a multitude of other sources, the book traces the slow fragmentation of the field from 1880 to the divisions of the 1940s manifest today in the diverse professions of academia, history teaching, and public history. By revealing how the founders of the contemporary historical enterprise envisioned the future of the discipline, it offers insight into our own historical moment and the way the discipline has adapted and changed over time.

Who were the Native Americans? Where did they come from and how long ago? Did they have a history, and would they have a future? Questions such as these dominated intellectual life in the United States during the nineteenth century. And for many Americans, such questions about the original inhabitants of their homeland inspired a flurry of historical investigation, scientific inquiry, and heated political debate. This book traces the struggle of Americans trying to understand the people who originally occupied the continent claimed as their own. The book considers how the question of the Indian compelled Americans to abandon older explanatory frameworks for sovereignty like the Bible and classical literature and instead develop new ones. Through their engagement with Native American language and culture, American intellectuals helped shape and define the emerging fields of archaeology, ethnology, linguistics, and art. But more important, the questions posed by the presence of the Indian in the United States forced Americans to confront the meaning of history itself, both that of Native Americans and their own: how it should be studied, what drove its processes, and where it might ultimately lead. The encounter with Native Americans, this book argues, helped give rise to a distinctly American historical consciousness.

Before skyscrapers and streetlights glowed at all hours, American cities fell into inky blackness with each setting of the sun. But over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, new technologies began to light up streets, sidewalks, buildings, and public spaces. This book depicts the changing experience of the urban night over this period, visiting a host of actors—scavengers, newsboys, and mashers alike—in the nocturnal city. The author examines work, crime, transportation, and leisure as he moves through the gaslight era, exploring the spread of modern police forces and the emergence of late-night entertainment, to the era of electricity, when social campaigns sought to remove women and children from public areas at night. While many people celebrated the transition from darkness to light as the arrival of twenty-four hours of daytime, he shows that certain social patterns remained, including the danger of street crime and the skewed gender profile of night work. Sweeping us from concert halls and brothels to streetcars and industrial forges, the book is an illuminating study of a vital era in American urban history.

This book is a history of forecasting in the United States from the 1860s to the 1920s that examines how methods of prediction and ideas about predictability changed as Americans reckoned with new uncertainties in post-Civil War economy and culture and debated whether it was possible to predict the future with any degree of certainty. The book examines crop forecasting, weather forecasting, economic forecasting, utopian literature, and fortune-telling and considers forecasts as forms of knowledge production and tools for risk management. The book’s main argument revises the historical interpretation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a “search for order” by demonstrating that a search for predictability yielded the opposite: acceptance of the uncertainties of twentieth-century economic and cultural life. It demonstrates how routinized forecasts of everyday life became ubiquitous in a late-nineteenth-century culture of prediction, revising scholarly accounts that locate the origins of professional forecasting in the Cold War. The book also uncovers rural origins of modern bureaucratic rationality in the histories of crop and weather forecasting, both of which depended on large-scale government information networks that are an overlooked example of the size and reach of the nineteenth-century American state. The book emphasizes controversies over forecasts’ meaning and value, contests over forecasters’ authority and expertise, and epistemic debates over the nature of forecasting itself.

This book is an exploration of the cultural meanings and legal consequences ascribed to the concept of individual, voluntary membership by the first generations of American citizens, between 1783 and 17840. It attempts to explain post-Revolutionary Americans’ propensity to form and join voluntary associations by looking at how they described and defended their ideas about what voluntary membership should look like. Within their own groups, joiners and organizers of American private associations found in law and in an emphasis on procedural fairness a way to cohere. And yet their legalistic framing of their own efforts to act collectively had another consequence: as more joiners in early national associations came to conceive of their participation as one of well-defined rights and obligations, legal institutions (chiefly, courts of law) occupied an increasingly important position in the monitoring of those internal relationships. Examining the contests over the meanings and consequences of voluntary membership reveals that, in the young United States, law provided the substructure for American civil society. Post-Revolutionary Americans, consciously and deliberately, sought to balance their need for effective, concerted action with their concerns for individual autonomy and personal rights. The answers that they settled upon then helped to shape their attitudes toward public and private law, toward constitutionalism, and toward individualism and cooperation in ways that transformed American society.

In the nineteenth century, Americans began to use maps in radically new ways. For the first time, medical men mapped diseases to understand and prevent epidemics, natural scientists mapped climate and rainfall to uncover weather patterns, educators mapped the past to foster national loyalty among students, and Northerners mapped slavery to assess the power of the South. After the Civil War, federal agencies embraced statistical and thematic mapping in order to profile the ethnic, racial, economic, moral, and physical attributes of a reunified nation. By the end of the century, Congress had authorized a national archive of maps, an explicit recognition that old maps were not relics to be discarded but unique records of the nation's past. All of these experiments involved the realization that maps were not just illustrations of data, but visual tools that were uniquely equipped to convey complex ideas and information. This book charts how maps of epidemic disease, slavery, census statistics, the environment, and the past demonstrated the analytical potential of cartography, and in the process transformed the very meaning of a map. Today, statistical and thematic maps are so ubiquitous that we take for granted that data will be arranged cartographically. Whether for urban planning, public health, marketing, or political strategy, maps have become everyday tools of social organization, governance, and economics. The world we inhabit—saturated with maps and graphic information—grew out of this sea change in spatial thought and representation in the nineteenth century.

The public spaces and buildings of the United States are home to many thousands of timepieces—bells, time balls, and clock faces—that tower over urban streets, peek out from lobbies, and gleam in store windows. And in the streets and squares beneath them, men, women, and children wear wristwatches of all kinds. Americans have decorated their homes with clocks and included them in their poetry, sermons, stories, and songs. And as political instruments, social tools, and cultural symbols, these personal and public timekeepers have enjoyed a broad currency in art, life, and culture. This book relates how the American preoccupation with time led people from across social classes to acquire watches and clocks. While noting the difficulties in regulating and synchronizing so many timepieces, the book expands our understanding of the development of modern time discipline, delving into the ways we have standardized time and describing how timekeepers have served as political, social, and cultural tools in a society that does not merely value time, but regards access to time as a natural-born right, a privilege of being an American.

Veins of iron run deep in the history of America. Iron making began almost as soon as European settlement, with the establishment of the first ironworks in colonial Massachusetts, yet it was Great Britain that became the Atlantic world’s dominant low-cost, high-volume producer of iron, a position it retained throughout the nineteenth century. It was not until after the Civil War that American iron producers began to match the scale and efficiency of the British iron industry. This book argues that the prolonged development of the US iron industry was largely due to geographical problems the British did not face. Pairing exhaustive manuscript research with analysis of a detailed geospatial database that she built of the industry, the author reconstructs the American iron industry in unprecedented depth, from locating hundreds of iron companies in their social and environmental contexts to explaining workplace culture and social relations between workers and managers. She demonstrates how ironworks in Alabama, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia struggled to replicate British technologies but, in the attempt, brought about changes in the American industry that set the stage for the subsequent age of steel. The book sheds light on American ambitions and highlights the challenges a young nation faced as it grappled with its geographic conditions.

Why did Americans create a federal government after the American Revolution? How did this new government work? This book explores these questions by telling the story of federal customhouses in the early American republic. At the customhouse, the federal government was to collect taxes and regulate trade. But how could the government do so with limited manpower and resources? The founding leadership, especially Alexander Hamilton, looked to the precedent of the British Empire and built a customs system by negotiating authority with the merchants who paid taxes and imported goods. As the federal government collected revenue and regulated trade, though, merchant capitalists gained outsized influence over governance at the customhouses. During Jefferson’s Embargo and the War of 1812, they used this influence to thwart enforcement of harsh new trade regulations. After the War, Americans then negotiated authority with merchants that had once anchored the federal government but who now became a pressing moral and legal problem. As Americans envisioned a new liberal order, jurists and politicians set about to dissemble the close ties between merchant capitalists and customs officers in order to ensure permanently separate the state from the marketplace.