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History - American — page 4
1,154 public-domain history - american books, summarised. Page 4 of 25.

The Journal of Negro History, Volume 8, 1923
Various
This collection of primary research, essays, and documents serves as a vital archive of early twentieth-century scholarship regarding the black experience in America and abroad. It remains a foundational text for understanding the systematic recovery of a neglected history.

A New History of the United States: The greater republic, embracing the growth and achievements of our country from the earliest days of discovery and settlement to the present eventful year
Charles Morris
A continental wilderness becomes a world power as thirteen coastal colonies expand westward, weather civil war, and ultimately claim overseas territories.

The History of Dartmouth College
Baxter Perry Smith
This account traces the precarious founding and institutional development of an iconic American college, grounding its survival in the singular vision of its founder and the resilience of those who followed.

The Thirty-Ninth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteers, 1862-1865
Alfred S. (Alfred Seelye) Roe
Forged in the recruitment rallies of Massachusetts towns and tested along the bloody roads to Richmond, a Union infantry regiment endures three years of exhaustion, swamp fever, and devastating combat to preserve the American Republic.

A History of Matrimonial Institutions, Vol. 2 of 3
George Elliott Howard
The evolution of human marriage reveals a fierce, centuries-long tug-of-war between church doctrine and state authority over who controls the family unit.

The Story of the Mormons, from the Date of Their Origin to the Year 1901
William Alexander Linn
An exhaustive, secular record maps the rise of a homegrown American theology, tracing its path from frontier folk magic and manufactured scripture through bloodshed, migration, and the building of a desert empire.

The Story of the Great War, Volume 5: Battle of Jutland Bank
Unknown
Steel hulls shatter, mountain ridges crumble under artillery, and diplomats exchange bitter warnings as the conflict expands across continents and oceans, threatening to pull neutral powers into its devastating vortex.

The Modern Ku Klux Klan
Henry P. (Henry Peck) Fry
A former recruiter exposes a shadowy, highly profitable organization using secret rituals, military discipline, and manufactured hatred to subvert American law.

Two Centuries of New Milford Connecticut: An Account of the Bi-Centennial Celebration of the Founding of the Town Held June 15, 16, 17, and 18, 1907, With a Number of Historical Articles and Reminiscences
Various
A Connecticut river town marks two centuries of survival, capturing the quiet evolution of a New England frontier community through its wars, faith, and daily gatherings.

The Battle of April 19, 1775: in Lexington, Concord, Lincoln, Arlington, Cambridge, Somerville and Charlestown, Massachusetts
Frank Warren Coburn
Alarmed by nocturnal signals, armed provincial farmers converged on a winding stretch of Massachusetts highway to battle the retreating columns of the British army.

The Three Charters of the Virginia Company of London: With Seven Related Documents
Virginia 350th Anniversary Celebration Corporation
Long before a nation took shape in North America, a series of parchment directives transformed a speculative mercantile venture into the legal and administrative architecture of English settlement.

Progress and Achievements of the Colored People: Containing the Story of the Wonderful Advancement of the Colored Americans—the Most Marvelous in the History of Nations—Their Past Accomplishments, Together With Their Present-day Opportunities and a Glimpse Into the Future for Further Developments—the Dawn of a Triumphant Era. A Handbook for Self-improvement Which Leads to Greater Success
Kelly Miller
A comprehensive volume details how African Americans built robust educational, economic, and civic structures within fifty years of emancipation.

The New English Canaan of Thomas Morton with Introductory Matter and Notes
Thomas Morton
A sprawling natural haven becomes a battleground of culture and law when an outspoken English trader settles in seventeenth-century New England.

Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Cavalry of the Army: of the United States 1917. To be also used by Engineer Companies (Mounted) for Cavalry Instruction and Training
United States. War Department
This handbook offers a meticulous blueprint for converting raw recruits into disciplined, self-reliant cavalrymen on the eve of World War I. Every page translates military doctrine into concrete physical actions.

The Philippines: Past and Present (Volume 1 of 2)
Dean C. (Dean Conant) Worcester
American administrative power in the Pacific rests on the conviction that good governance can be scientifically engineered, documented, and imposed for a population’s own benefit.

A Brief Account of the Educational Publishing Business in the United States
William Edmond Pulsifer
A quiet revolution unfolded in nineteenth-century classrooms as crude slate primers gave way to colorful, scientifically designed textbooks. This history illuminates how American publishers transformed basic literacy into a sophisticated, highly organized national enterprise.

Lands of the Slave and the Free
Henry A. (Henry Anthony) Murray
To traverse mid-nineteenth-century North America is to witness a continent suspended between extraordinary material promise and the dark, impending shadow of civil fracture.

The Loyalists of Massachusetts and the Other Side of the American Revolution
James Henry Stark
Centuries of patriotic legend have obscured the tragic, complex fate of the American colonists who remained loyal to the British Crown.

A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin: Presenting the original facts and documents upon which the story is founded. Together with corroborative statements verifying the truth of the work
Harriet Beecher Stowe
A meticulous, devastating collection of public documents, court rulings, and firsthand testimonies demonstrates that the horrors of American slavery are not literary exaggerations, but daily, legally protected realities.

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains
Isabella L. (Isabella Lucy) Bird
A solitary woman on horseback rides eight hundred miles through the high, frozen wilderness of the nineteenth-century American West, discovering an untamed world of mountain peaks, rough-hewn log cabins, and dangerous, outcast souls.

Chapters of Opera: Being historical and critical observations and records concerning the lyric drama in New York from its earliest days down to the present time
Henry Edward Krehbiel
Behind the velvet curtains and sparkling box tiers of New York’s operatic history lies a turbulent chronicle of cultural ambition, financial ruin, and artistic battle.

A Social History of the American Negro: Being a History of the Negro Problem in the United States. Including A History and Study of the Republic of Liberia
Benjamin Griffith Brawley
A sweeping study of African American history traces a journey from the arrival of early African captives to the violent aftermath of the First World War.

America's War for Humanity
Thomas Herbert Russell
When global civilization hangs in the balance, a peaceful republic must shed its isolation, organize its vast internal power, and hurl its manpower across the sea to tip the scales of history.

Great Britain and the American Civil War
Ephraim Douglass Adams
A young, powerful nation splits in two, and the world’s preeminent empire must decide whether to watch, intervene, or profit from the ruin.

A History of Matrimonial Institutions, Vol. 3 of 3
George Elliott Howard
Marriage is not an unchanging decree of nature, but a shifting human institution forged through millennia of legal, religious, and economic compromise.

Stage-coach and Tavern Days
Alice Morse Earle
Travel in early America unfolds not through grand monuments, but across rutted turnpikes, inside crowded taprooms, and over the creaking footboards of Concord stage-coaches.

The History of Cuba, vol. 1
Willis Fletcher Johnson
Before European ships ever reached its harbors, Cuba was already a complex, evolving world shaped by its distinct geology, its rich flora, and its native communities.

Ku Klux Klan: Its Origin, Growth and Disbandment
John C. Lester
A mysterious post-Civil War secret society transforms from a small-town social club into a terrifying political apparatus that reshapes the Southern landscape before collapsing under its own unmanageable violence.

The Promise of American Life
Herbert David Croly
The national Promise is not a guaranteed inheritance, but a deliberate goal requiring a transformation of American democracy. This landmark work argues that the country must trade its Jeffersonian suspicions for Hamiltonian organization to survive.

Domestic Manners of the Americans
Frances Milton Trollope
This observant travelogue offers a sharp, uncompromising look at American life in the late 1820s, capturing the friction between a tradition-bound European sensibility and the raw, egalitarian spirit of the young United States.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
These pages capture the urgent pulse of a nation fractured by civil war, blending frontline dispatches with the intellectual preoccupations of a nineteenth-century public. It is a vital record of a country in transition.

Original Photographs Taken on the Battlefields during the Civil War of the United States
Francis Trevelyan Miller
This volume serves as a somber, visual testament to the American Civil War, preserving a vast archive of battlefield photography that once risked being lost to time. It acts as an essential bridge between the historical record and the visceral reality of the front lines.

How Justice Grew: Virginia Counties, An Abstract of Their Formation
Martha W. (Martha Woodroof) Hiden
The formation of Virginia’s counties reflects the steady, deliberate movement of a frontier society seeking to bring the reach of law to the edge of the wilderness.

A Defence of Virginia: And Through Her, of the South, in Recent and Pending Contests Against the Sectional Party
Robert Lewis Dabney
This work presents a fervent, detailed defense of the antebellum Southern social order, constructed through rigorous theological and historical interpretation during the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War.

The pirates of the New England coast, 1630-1730
George Francis Dow
The rugged, indented shoreline of early New England served as a clandestine gateway for outlaws who blurred the line between legitimate privateering and lawless piracy. This chronicle documents the century-long struggle to contain these maritime predators.

Artillery Through the Ages: A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America
Albert C. Manucy
HOOK This illustrated study traces the evolution of cannon from early bombards to the sophisticated rifled artillery that transformed the American battlefield.

An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America
J. P. (John Patterson) MacLean
Thousands of displaced Scots sought a new life in the American wilderness, only to find themselves caught in the gears of a revolution they neither invited nor understood.

Blazing the Way
Emily Inez Denny
The pioneer experience in the Pacific Northwest was a rugged process of clearing forests, building homes, and navigating a rapidly shifting landscape. This collection captures the quiet, persistent labor of those who first transformed a wilderness into a home.

History of the American Negro in the Great World War: His Splendid Record in the Battle Zones of Europe
William Allison Sweeney
This chronicle documents the crucial contributions and battlefield heroism of African American soldiers during the First World War, arguing that their service secured a permanent claim to full citizenship and national honor.

New England and the Bavarian Illuminati
Vernon Stauffer
When a fledgling American republic faced political upheaval, fears of a shadowy, anti-religious conspiracy—the Bavarian Illuminati—swept through New England’s pulpits, igniting a hysteria that tested the limits of reason and civil order.

Canyons of the Colorado
John Wesley Powell
A wooden boat plunges down an uncharted river into a labyrinth of sheer sandstone, driven by men who measure the earth while fighting for their lives.

France and England in North America, Part I: Pioneers of France in the New World
Francis Parkman
Before European powers drew rigid borders across North America, rival movements of faith, commerce, and ambition fought fragile footholds into the vast forest, where small bands of men made choices that echoed across a continent.

The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War
Annie Heloise Abel
A harrowing look at political betrayal, Annie Heloise Abel’s history uncovers how the Union and Confederacy used, abandoned, and shattered Native nations during the American Civil War.

History of the Jews in America: From the Period of the Discovery of the New World to the Present Time
Peter Wiernik
Long before modern waves of immigration reshaped the Western Hemisphere, Sephardic landholders, merchant pioneers, and resilient refugees were building vibrant communities across the Americas.

West Point: An Intimate Picture of the National Military Academy and of the Life of the Cadet
Robert C. (Robert Charlwood) Richardson
Beneath the severe granite battlements along the Hudson, raw American youth transforms into a unified, disciplined officer corps bound by a singular code of honor.

The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier
Charles E. (Charles Eugene) Flandrau
Before Minnesota became a powerhouse of agriculture and industry, its borderlands were shaped by fierce territorial squabbles, economic gambles, and violent encounters between native inhabitants and expanding European settlers. This volume collects early historical records alongside vivid personal memoirs to trace…

The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark
Eva Emery Dye
A sweeping march across the American continent, where frontier warfare, high diplomacy, and the raw grit of wilderness survival collide to shape a young nation's destiny.

The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States
Martin Robison Delany
A bold nineteenth-century treatise rejects domestic subordination and outlines a self-determined path toward black political independence and global migration.