It didn't take long for freshman Congressman Stephen A. Douglas to see the truth of Senator Thomas Hart Benton's warning: slavery attached itself to every measure that came before the U.S. Congress. Douglas wanted to expand the nation into an ocean-bound republic. Yet slavery and the violent conflicts it stirred always interfered, as it did in 1844 with his first bill to organize Nebraska. In 1848, when America acquired 550,000 square miles after the Mexican War, the fight began over whether the territory would be free or slave. Henry Clay, a slave owner who favored gradual emancipation, packaged territorial bills from Douglas's committee with four others. But Clay's "Omnibus Bill" failed. Exhausted, he left the Senate, leaving Douglas in control. Within two weeks, Douglas won passage of all eight bills, and President Millard Fillmore signed the Compromise of 1850. It was Douglas's greatest legislative achievement. This book, a sequel to the author's Stephen A. Douglas: The Political Apprenticeship, 1833-1843, fully details Douglas's early congressional career. The text chronicles how Douglas moved the issue of slavery from Congress to the ballot box.

When newly elected Illinois State Representative Abraham Lincoln first saw 5'4" Stephen A. Douglas, he sized him up as "the least man I ever saw." With the introduction of Douglas's first bill in 1834, Lincoln soon thought differently. The General Assembly not only passed the bill, it appointed the 21-year-old Douglas State's Attorney of Illinois' largest judicial district, replacing John J. Hardin, one of Lincoln's most powerful political allies. It was the first of many Douglas-Lincoln contests in the decade ahead. Struggles over banking, internal improvements, party organizations, the seat of government and slavery--even romantic rivalry--put them on opposing sides long before the 1860 presidential election. These battles were Douglas's political apprenticeship and he would use what he learned to obstruct Lincoln--his friend and nemesis--while becoming the most powerful Democrat in the nation.

In 1790, it was not a given that the young United States, bruised and healing from its struggle for independence and populated by fewer than 4 million inhabitants, would even survive, much less flourish. But the great adventure that came next—the exploration and settlement of the lands lying to the west and stretching to the Pacific Ocean—would build a nation where only a patchwork of eastern seaboard colonies had existed before. The first book in this series, Out Where the West Begins: Profiles, Visions, & Strategies of Early Western Business Leaders, profiled fifty individuals who made significant contributions to the economic development of a young nation. This second volume follows the saga of more than one hundred influential men and women—political and military leaders, religious thinkers, civil rights proponents, suffragettes, African American pioneers, writers and artists, explorers and surveyors, architects, inventors, innovators, medical professionals, and conservationists—who together wove the story of early western frontier America. The engaging account of their lives forms a unique tapestry of human experience. In the words of the author, “Understanding our distinctive past helps us better comprehend who we are now and who we wish to become.”

A concise, comprehensive overview of the major personalities and pivotal events of the war that redefined the American nation.

The Civil War was the most devastating event in U.S. history, in which over half a million Americans paid for their beliefs with their lives. The heroic battles, harrowing marches, and military genius of generals on both sides still inspire books, movies, and the imaginations of Civil War buffs. Less obvious are the economic, political, social, and cultural repercussions of the war, which continue to influence American life. Reconstruction and the end of slavery brought deep-seated problems to the reunited nation. This single-volume encyclopedia includes 245 entries on all facets of the conflicted era. It features articles on: * Battles and campaigns (Gettysburg, Shiloh, Sherman's March to the Sea) * Culture (music, photography, religion) * Economic affairs (cost of the war, gold, Richmond Bread Riot) * Foreign affairs (France, Great Britain, Laird rams) * Health and welfare (disease, medicine, prisons) * Ideologies (federalism, free-labor ideology) * Legislative landmarks (14th Amendment, Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Wade-Davis bill) * Military terms, strategy, and weaponry (cavalry, rifles, tactics) * Minorities (black suffrage, emancipation, Native Americans) * Political events and organizations (Constitutional Union party, election of 1860, fire-eaters) * Prominent individuals (Clara Barton, Frederick Douglass, Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman) * Social reform (abolitionism, women's rights movement) * Women (nurses, women in the war, individual women) More than 200 black-and-white illustrations, including over a dozen maps, complement the entries. A list of selected Civil War museums and historic sites, suggestions for further reading, recommended websites, and a chronology of the war round out this essential resource. Oxford's Student Companions to American History are state-of-the-art references for school and home, specifically designed and written for ages 12 through adult. Each book is a concise but comprehensive A-to-Z guide to a major historical period or theme in U.S. history, with articles on key issues and prominent individuals. The authors--distinguished scholars well-known in their areas of expertise--ensure that the entries are accurate, up-to-date, and accessible. Special features include an introductory section on how to use the book, further reading lists, cross-references, chronology, and full index.

William J. Bennett reacquaints America with its heritage in two volumes of America: The Last Best Hope. While national test scores reveal that American students know startlingly little about their history, former U.S. Education Secretary William J. Bennett offers one of the most gripping and memorable versions of the American story in print. The two volumes of Bennett's New York Times bestselling epic, America: The Last Best Hope, cover Columbus's discovery of the New World in the fifteenth century to the fall of world communism in the twentieth. Now both volumes are available in a convenient and attractive slip case-complete with a bonus audio CD, "Remembering Ronald Reagan," featuring recollections and commentary by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Edwin Meese, and others. Bill Bennett brings American history to life with stories such as: the coup d'etat quelled by a pair of reading glasses the U.S. senator nearly caned to death on the Senate floor the presidential pardon for hundreds of Sioux warriors one ex-president's race to finish his memoirs and the famous humorist who helped him when Time magazine named Hitler man of the year Eisenhower's bold actions documenting the horrors of the Holocaust Nixon's comic opera uniforms for White House guards Reagan's most famous example of just saying "No" From heroism of the Revolution to the dire hours of the Civil War, from the progressive reforms of the early 1900s to the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, from the high drama of the Space Race to the gut-wrenching tension of the Cold War, Bennett slices through the cobwebs of time, memory, and prevailing cynicism to reinvigorate America with an informed patriotism. Praise for America: The Last Best Hope "This is the American history that Abraham Lincoln has long awaited." -Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided "Bennett has a gift for choosing the pithy, revealing anecdote and for providing fresh character sketches and critical analyses of the leading figures. This is an American history that adults will find refreshing and enlightening and that younger readers will find a darn good read." -Michael Barone, US News & World Report "A worthy and necessary book for our time." -Michael J. Lewis, Commentary "Bennett ... has a strong sense of narrative, a flair for anecdote and a lively style. And the American story really is a remarkable one, filled with its share of brilliant leaders and tragic mistakes. Bennett brings that story to life." -Alan Wolfe, The Washington Post "The role of history is to inform, inspire, and sometimes provoke us, which is why Bill Bennett's wonderfully readable book is so important. He puts our nation's triumphs, along with its lapses, into the context of a narrative about the progress of freedom. Every now and then it's useful to be reminded that we are a fortunate people, blessed with generations of leaders who repeatedly renewed the meaning of America." -Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life "The importance of America: The Last Best Hope probably exceeds anything Dr. Bennett has ever written, and it is more elegantly crafted and eminently readable than any comprehensive work of history I've read in a very long time. It's silly to compare great works of history to great novels, but this book truly is a page-turner." -Brad Miner, American Compass "This lively book acknowledges mistakes and shortcomings, yet patriotically asserts that the American experiment in democracy is still a success story." -School Library Journal

This easy-to-use handbook presents a fascinating and fresh take on American presidential elections and makes a wide range of statistics available to serious researchers and political fanatics alike. Counting the Votes: A New Way to Analyze America's Presidential Elections isn't your typical history book about presidential elections. Nor is it like most statistical analyses of election results. What this unusual book does offer is an array of innovative statistics—campaign score (CS), potential index (PI), return on potential (ROP), and equalized vote totals (EV*EQ), among others—that provides a provocative, intriguing, and fresh perspective on past presidential candidates and campaigns. Presenting information that has never been compiled and presented before, author G. Scott Thomas provides reams of statistics for all 57 presidential elections (1789 to the present) as well as essays inspired by those races that explore new interpretations of electoral trends. The book also includes lists of outstanding political performances in 179 statistical categories in addition to complete statistical records for 289 presidential candidates. The unique information and metrics introduced in this book will be invaluable to historians, political scientists, and students who are conducting research into voting trends and will serve as additional tools for their work.

The Young Americans were a nationalist movement within the Democratic Party made up of writers and politicians associated with the New York periodical, the Democratic Review. In this revealing book, Mark Power Smith explores the ways in which–in dialogue with its critics–the movement forged contrasting visions of American nationalism in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Frustrated, fifty years after independence, by Britain’s political and cultural influence on the United States, the Young Americans drew on a wide variety of intellectual authorities—in the fields of literature, political science, phrenology and international law—to tie popular sovereignty for white men to the universalist idea of natural rights. The movement supported a noxious program of foreign interventionism, racial segregation, and cultural nationalism. What united these policies was a new view of national allegiance: one that saw democracy and free trade not as political privileges but as natural rights for white men. Despite its national reach, this view of the Union inadvertently turned Northern and Southern states against each other, helping to cultivate the conditions for the Civil War. In the end, the Young America movement was ultimately consumed by the sectional ideologies it had brought into being.

Modeling his latest book on Richard Hofstadter’s 1948 classic The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, the renowned historian Paul Escott has composed ten concise but deeply learned and incisive biographies of key Americans in the years leading up to the Civil War. Escott profiles Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Stephen A. Douglas, Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, Horace Greeley, Albion Tourgée, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, illustrating how these men and women established, embodied, and advanced the opposing political and cultural trends that culminated in the great crisis of the nineteenth century. Covering figures from across a wide political spectrum, Escott reveals numerous streams and facets of nineteenth-century American political thought to illuminate the forces, from slavery to suffrage, underlying this greatest of conflicts. Written accessibly and with a magisterial command of the subject, The Civil War Political Tradition is both a perfect introduction to this history and a penetrating new meditation on its players.