History American

Hardcover. Auburn, Derby, Miller and Company, 1st, 1849, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 404 pages, with tissue guarded frontispiece portrait of Adams and gilt title on spine. Previous owner's signature on front endpaper and fly leaf, spine edge and corner wear, light foxing on some pages. Overall, clean and tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, Mason Brothers, 1st, 1858, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 696 pages, with frontispiece portrait and tissue guard. Previous owner's bookplate on front endpaper, edge and corner wear, small crack along top spine edge, and light foxing on some pages. Overall, in clean and tight condition.

Hardcover. London, Bell and Daldy, 1st, 1864, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 452 pages. Red cloth covers with embossed graphic border and gilt titles to spine. Light rubbing to covers, slight wear to cover edges and corners, front cover and backstrip of spine separated from page block, though page block still attached to rear cover.

Hardcover. NY, Time Life, reprint, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 456 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Dark blue leather bound with gilt titles to front cover and spine. Embossed decoration on front cover. Gilt text block edges, red ribbon marker. Clean, tight copy. In 1861 William Watson, a native Scot who had established himself as a Louisiana businessman, enlisted in the Confederate forces although still a British subject. In 1887 he penned his memoirs "to give", he said, "a simple narrative of my experience in a war campaign". Far from simple, Watson's work clearly and forcefully describes his experiences with the 3rd Louisiana infantry in battles at Wilson's Creek and Pea Ridge while depicting the mundane aspects of camp life and providing delightful and colorful character sketches of fellow soldiers and officers, including the legendary General Ben McCulloch. But Watson offers much more than the story of a soldier's life. He also provides an excellent depiction of southern society undergoing the crisis of secession and the tumultuous early years of the Civil War.

Hardcover. Chicago, The Lakeside Press, 1st, 1916, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, dark green cloth stamped in gilt, top edge gilt, 137 pages. Tight, attractive copy of this early "Lakeside Classic," the annual keepsake presented by this printer/publisher to friends and clients starting in 1903. Illustrated with tissue-protected frontispiece portrait of Black Hawk from a portrait painted by Robert M. Sully at Fort Monroe in 1833. This book was originally published in 1833 (dictated by Chief Black Hawk to his translator, Antoine Leclair) and was an immediate best seller. A no holds barred and unflinching narrative of the great Sauk leader. It includes an account of the cause and general history of the Black Hawk War. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Hartford, F. A. Brown, 2nd, 1856, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 267 pages of main text plus Appendix and 12 pages of Press reviews. Black & white illustrations. Light foxing throughout. Light wear to cloth covers with fading to spine. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Hartford CT, F.A. Brown, 1st, 1856, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, gray cloth, covers embossed with floral designs in blind-stamp. Gilt medallion front cover, gilt lettering and Hale Monument on spine, 230 pages, errata page at conclusion. Gutter crack at page 60, but not bad, binding solid. Eight b&w plates with tissue guards. Previous owner's signature (dated 1856) on blank pelim page. A biography of the soldier in the Continental Army and member of Knowlton's Rangers, the first organized intelligence service organization of the United States of America. Hale spied on the British, and was captured and executed during a mission in New York City. His service earned him the title of state hero of Connecticut.

Hardcover. New York, Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1st, 1856, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 493 pages. Hardcover. Illustrated with black & white engravings. Foxing to frontis, title page, and occurring to pages surrounding illustrated pages. Brown cloth covers with fading, rubbing moderate wear. Binding is firm. Good + condition.

Hardcover. NY, D. Appleton and Company, 1st, 1870, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth with gilt lettering on spine, gilt design on front cover. 589 pages, engraved portrait of Webster with tissue guard. VOLUME ONE ONLY. A comprehensive & complete history of Mr. Webster by his literary executor, George Ticknor Curtis. Faint pencil notation to blank prelim page otherwise a clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. New York, Harper and Brothers, reprint, 1846, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Two volumes, 260 and 308 pages, b&w engraved portrait of Jones in Vol.1. Both books bound in half black leather and blue boards with gilt lettering and raised bands on spine, top edge gilt. Previous owner's bookplate inside front covers. Light foxing, mainly to preliminary pages. Beautiful set.

Hardcover. San Marino,CA, The Huntington Library, 1st, 1949, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, price-clipped dust jacket, 161 pages. Official records from the Pinkerton detective agency & other documentary sources are drawn on to present the story of "a plot and counterplot, stranger than fiction" involving a plan to assassinate president-elect Abraham Lincoln while en route to his inauguration in Washington in 1861, over 4 years before he was killed by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre. Previous owner's inscription on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt Brace & Co., 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 226 pages. Bringing Lincoln's own words to young readers, a collection of the sixteenth president's speeches, letters, and writings reveals the man behind the politician and is highlighted by linocut illustrations depicting Lincoln and his times by Stephen Alcorn. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 250 pages. b&w illustrations. The Progressive Era promoted a vision of America united by an emphasis on science and progressive reform. The zeal to modernize business, government and social relations extended to farm families and the ways women defined their roles. In this study of the expert advice offered by the domestic economy movement, Holt argues that women were not passive receptors of these views. Seeing their place in agriculture as multi-faceted and important, they eagerly accepted improved education and many modern appliances but often rejected suggestions conflicting with their own views of the rewards and values of farm life. Progressive reform inevitably left a mixed legacy; science and technology did not perfect rural society. But many programs such as 4-H and Master Homemaker still exist and are still shaped by women's desire to preserve and pass on the possibilities of rural life. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, The Macmillan Company,, 1st, 1948, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Three hardcover volumes in bright dust jackets, complete set. Blue cloth covers and gilt spine lettering. Volumes 1 & 2 are historical and cover the development of American literature from its European roots, and volume 3 is a comprehensive bibliography. This is a standard work in its field. Vol. 1: 636 pages, Vol.2: 639-1422; Vol. 3: 817 pages. The contents are clean and unmarked--there are no bookplates or ownership names. Dust jackets in protective mylar, no slipcase.

Hardcover. US, Combined Books, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 312 pages, b&w illustrations. Light shelf-wear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. The destruction of George Armstrong Custer's command at Little Bighorn by the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne on 25 June, 1876 has been etched in the national memory and has remained one of America's longest lingering controversies. The Little Bighorn Campaign penetrates the mysteries of Custer's disaster as well as the broader context of the 1876 campaign against the Sioux.

Hardcover. London/New York, Edward Arnold, 1st, 1895, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 297 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Red cloth covers with gilt design. Multiple gutter cracks. Moderate to heavy rubbing to edges. Top corners bumped. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Basic Books, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, unclipped. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the title page. Throughout the nineteenth century, swarms of locusts regularly swept across the continent, turning noon into dusk, demolishing farm communities, and bringing trains to a halt as the crushed bodies of insects greased the rails. In 1876, the U.S. Congress declared the locust "the single greatest impediment to the settlement of the country." From the Dakotas to Texas, from California to Iowa, the swarms pushed thousands of settlers to the brink of starvation, prompting the federal government to enlist some of the greatest scientific minds of the day and thereby jumpstarting the fledgling science of entomology. Over the next few decades, the Rocky Mountain locust suddenly--and mysteriously--vanished.A century later, Jeffrey Lockwood set out to discover why. Unconvinced by the reigning theories, he searched for new evidence in musty books, crumbling maps, and crevassed glaciers, eventually piecing together the elusive answer: A group of early settlers unwittingly destroyed the locust's sanctuaries just as the insect was experiencing a natural population crash. Drawing on historical accounts and modern science, Locust brings to life the cultural, economic, and political forces at work in America in the late-nineteenth century, even as it solves one of the greatest ecological mysteries of our time. 294 pages, clean copy.

Hardcover. US, Tafnews Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 182 pages. B&w illustrations throughout. Includes appendix of race statistics. Clean, tight copy.

NY, Norton, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 480 pages, 410 b&w duotone plates seected from the 145,000 photographs made between 1935 and 1943 by a team of now-famous photographers employed by the Farm Security Administration, whose ranks included Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans. The agency's mission went well beyond photographing dispossessed rural people, and this book is proof. It includes 410 remarkable images made in large citiesas well as dozens of small towns and villages throughout the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Large format in a bright, unclipped dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Norton, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 480 pages, 410 b&w duotone plates seected from the 145,000 photographs made between 1935 and 1943 by a team of now-famous photographers employed by the Farm Security Administration, whose ranks included Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans. The agency's mission went well beyond photographing dispossessed rural people, and this book is proof. It includes 410 remarkable images made in large citiesas well as dozens of small towns and villages throughout the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Large format in a bright, unclipped dust jacket.

Hardcover. Netherlands, Dordrecht/Republic of Letters, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, illustrated glossy boards, 281 pages. For the first four decades of the twentieth century Philip Kerr, the Eleventh Marquess of Lothian, hovered on the fringes of power in Britain. As a commentator on public affairs, private secretary to Liberal prime minister David Lloyd George, secretary to the Rhodes Trust, Liberal peer, and ambassador to the United States at the beginning of World War II, Lothian's greatest interest was in preserving and strengthening the British Empire and building close bonds with the United States. This international collection of essays by seven scholars explores Lothian's impact on Anglo-American relations and his role, behind the scenes and as a government official, in forging what would eventually become known as the "special relationship." Clean copy.

Hardcover. Iowa City, University Of Iowa Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR on the half-title page. 268 pages. In this vigorous challenge to dominant literary criticism, Jerome Loving extends the traditional period of American literary rebirth to the end of the 19th century and argues for the intrinsic value of literature in the face of new historicist and deconstructionist readings. Bucking the trend for revisionist interpretations, Loving discusses the major work of the 19th century's canonized writers as restorative adventures with the self and society. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Criterion, 1st, 1960, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket, 603 pages. Classic study of American Fiction from 1789 till 1960. Tight and square. Unmarked, clean copy.