The Americans: The Colonial Experience

Written by Daniel J. Boorstin

Format: Trade Paperback, 448 pages
On Sale: March 12, 1964
Price: $16.95

Winner of the Bancroft Prize

"A superb panorama of life in America from the first settlements on through the white-hot days of the Revolution...an amazingly stimulating and brilliant study of America's past in which its present may be recognized and its future envisioned."--Saturday Review

Also available from Vintage: Americans: The National Experience... Read more >

Israel on the Appomattox
A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War
Written by Melvin Patrick Ely

Format: Trade Paperback, 656 pages
On Sale: August 16, 2005
Price: $18.00

WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE
WINNER OF THE ALBERT J. BEVERIDGE AWARD
WINNER OF THE WESLEY-LOGAN PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE FREDERICK DOUGLASS and JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN PRIZES

Thomas Jefferson denied that whites and liberated blacks could live together in harmony. His cousin, Richard Randolph, not only disagreed, but made it possible for ninety African... Read more >

This Republic of Suffering
Death and the American Civil War
Written by Drew Gilpin Faust

Format: Trade Paperback, 368 pages
On Sale: January 6, 2009
Price: $15.95

An illuminating study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and practicalities of death in the face of the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War.

During the war, approximately 620,000 soldiers lost their lives. An equivalent proportion of today’s population would be six million. This Republic of Suffering explores the impact... Read more >

Roll, Jordan, Roll
The World the Slaves Made
Written by Eugene D. Genovese

Format: Trade Paperback, 864 pages
On Sale: January 12, 1976
Price: $20.00

Winner of the Bancroft Prize
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-fiction

“The most profound, learned and detailed analysis of. . . slavery to appear since World War II. It covers an incredible range of topics and offers fresh insights on nearly every page. . . . Genovese’s great gift is... Read more >

The Name of War
King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity
Written by Jill Lepore

Format: Trade Paperback, 368 pages
On Sale: April 27, 1999
Price: $16.95

Winner of the Bancroft Prize

Winner of the the 1998 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of the Phi Beta Kappa Society

King Philip’s War, the excruciating racial war—colonists against Indians—that erupted in New England in 1675, was, in proportion to population, the bloodiest in American history. Some even argued that the massacres and outrages... Read more >

Walt Whitman's America
A Cultural Biography
Written by David S. Reynolds

Format: Trade Paperback, 704 pages
On Sale: March 19, 1996
Price: $22.00

Winner of the Bancroft Prize
Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award

In his poetry Whitman set out to encompass all of America and in so doing heal its deepening divisions. This magisterial biography demonstrates the epic scale of his achievement, as well as the dreams and anxieties that impelled it, as... Read more >

The Destructive War
William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans
Written by Charles Royster

Format: Trade Paperback, 560 pages
On Sale: January 11, 1993
Price: $18.95

Winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Lincoln Prize, and Charles Sydnor Award of the Southern Historical Association

Through the biographies of two of the Civil War’s most important generals, Royster explores the massive violence the war unleashed—a violence that went quickly and completely out of control and far beyond the expectations of... Read more >

William Cooper's Town
Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic
Written by Alan Taylor

Format: Trade Paperback, 576 pages
On Sale: August 27, 1996
Price: $18.00

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the William J. Beveridge Award

This innovative work of social history, biography, and literary analysis is a study of two men, father and son, who embodied the contradictions that divided America in the early days of the Republic.  William Cooper seemed to manifest the... Read more >

A Midwife's Tale
The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812
Written by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Format: Trade Paperback, 464 pages
On Sale: June 4, 1991
Price: $15.95

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Winner of the Bancroft Prize
Winner of the Joan Kelly and John H. Dunning Prizes of the American Historical Association
Winner of the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women Book Prize

Drawing on the diaries of Martha Ballard, a midwife and healer in eighteenth-century Maine, this rare and evocative... Read more >