San Antonio College Library

Even while slavery existed, Americans debated the subject. Was it a profitable and healthy institution? If so, for whom? The abolition of slavery in 1865 did not end this debate. Mark Smith outlines the main contours of this subject.

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) is best known for designing parks in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Chicago, Boston, and the grounds of the Capitol in Washington. But before he embarked upon his career as the nation's foremost landscape architect, he was a correspondent for the New York Times, and it was under its auspices that he journeyed through the slave states in the 1850s. His day-by-day observations--including intimate accounts of the daily lives of...

"Sunset Limited explores the railroad's development and influence - especially as it affected land settlement, agriculture, water policy, and the environment - and offers a new perspective on the tremendous, often surprising, role the company played in shaping the American West." "Based on his unprecedented and extensive research into the company's historical archives, Richard Orsi finds that, contrary to conventional understanding, the Southern Pacific...

"In this major new history of the Civil War, Bruce Levine tells the riveting story of how that conflict upended the economic, political, and social life of the old South, utterly destroying the Confederacy and the society it represented and defended. Told through the words of the people who lived it, The Fall of the House of Dixie illuminates the way a war undertaken to preserve the status quo became a second American Revolution whose impact on the...

"Historians overwhelmingly have blamed the demise of Reconstruction on the South and on white Americans' persistent racism. Heather Cox Richardson argues instead that class, along with race, was critical to Reconstruction's end. Northern support for freed blacks and Reconstruction weakened as growing labor interests critiqued the economy and called for government redistribution of wealth." "Using newspapers, public speeches, popular tracts, Congressional...