Prior to the 2020 presidential election, historians considered the disputed 1876 contest—which pitted Republican Rutherford B. Hayes against Democrat Samuel J. Tilden—the most controversial in American history. Examining the work and conclusions of the Potter Committee, the congressional body tasked with investigating the vote, Adam Fairclough’s Bulldozed and Betrayed: Louisiana and the Stolen Elections of 1876 sheds new light on the events surrounding the electoral crisis, especially those that occurred in Louisiana, a state singled out for voter intimidation and rampant fraud. The Potter Committee’s inquiry led to embarrassment for Democrats, uncovering an array of bribes, forgeries, and even coded telegrams showing that the Tilden campaign had attempted to buy the presidency. Testimony also exposed the treachery of Hayes, who, once installed in the White House, permitted insurrectionary Democrats to overthrow the Republican government in Louisiana that had risen to power during the early days of Reconstruction.

Prior to the 2020 presidential election, historians considered the disputed 1876 contest—which pitted Republican Rutherford B. Hayes against Democrat Samuel J. Tilden—the most controversial in American history. Examining the work and conclusions of the Potter Committee, the congressional body tasked with investigating the vote, Adam Fairclough’s Bulldozed and Betrayed: Louisiana and the Stolen Elections of 1876 sheds new light on the events surrounding the electoral crisis, especially those that occurred in Louisiana, a state singled out for voter intimidation and rampant fraud. The Potter Committee’s inquiry led to embarrassment for Democrats, uncovering an array of bribes, forgeries, and even coded telegrams showing that the Tilden campaign had attempted to buy the presidency. Testimony also exposed the treachery of Hayes, who, once installed in the White House, permitted insurrectionary Democrats to overthrow the Republican government in Louisiana that had risen to power during the early days of Reconstruction.

Eminent domain entered the awareness of many Americans with the recent U.S. Supreme Court case Kelo v. New London. Across the political spectrum, people were outraged when the Court majority said that a local government may transfer property from one private party to another under the ''public use'' clause of the Constitution, for the sake of ''economic development. Carla T. Main - who in the past, as a lawyer, has represented the condemning authorities in eminent domain cases - examines how property rights in America have come to be so weak, tracing the history of eminent domain from the Revolutionary War to the Kelo case. But the heart of Bulldozed is a story of how eminent domain has affected an American family and the small-town community where they have lived and worked for decades. In the 1940s, Pappy and Isabel Gore established a shrimp processing plant in Freeport, Texas. Three generations of Gores built Western Seafood into a thriving business that stood up to fierce competition and market flux. But Freeport was struggling, and city officials decided that a private yacht marina on the Old Brazos River might save it. They would use eminent domain to take the Gores' waterfront property and hand it over to the developer, an heir of a legendary Texas oil family, in a risky sweetheart deal. For three years, the Gores resisted the taking with every ounce of strength they had. Around them, the fabric of the community unraveled as friends and neighbors took sides. Bulldozed vividly recounts the Gores' fight with city hall, and at the same time ponders larger questions of what property rights mean today and who among us is entitled to hold on to the American Dream.

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While historians have acknowledged that the issues of race, slavery, and emancipation were not unique to the American Civil War, they have less frequently recognized the conflict’s similarities to other global events. As renowned historian Carl Degler pointed out, the Civil War was “one among many” such conflicts during the mid-nineteenth century. Understanding the Civil War’s place in world history requires placing it within a global context of other mid-nineteenth-century political, social, and cultural issues and events. In The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism, Niels Eichhorn and Duncan A. Campbell explore the conflict from this perspective, taking a transnational and comparative approach, with a particular focus on the period from the 1830s to the 1870s. Eichhorn and Campbell examine the development of nationalism and its frequent manifestation, secession, by comparing the American experience with that of several other nations, including Germany, Hungary, and Brazil. They compare the Civil War to the Crimean and Franco-German wars to determine whether the American conflict was the first modern war. To gauge the potential of foreign intervention in the Civil War, they look to the time’s developing international debate on the legality of intercession and mediation in other nations’ insurgencies. Using the experiences of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, and the Antipodes, Eichhorn and Campbell suggest the extent to which the United States was an imperial project. To examine realpolitik, they study four vastly different practitioners—Otto von Bismarck, Louis Napoleon, Count Cavour, and Abraham Lincoln. Finally, they compare emancipation in the United States to that in Peru and the end of forced servitude in Russia, closing with a comparison of the memorialization of the Civil War with the experiences of other post-emancipation societies and an examination of how other nations mythologized their past conflicts and ignored uncomfortable truths in the pursuit of reconciliation. The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism avoids the limitations of American exceptionalism, making it the first genuine comparative and transnational study of the Civil War in an international context.

Rarely has a third political party in the United States exerted a force upon national events comparable to that of the Populists during the 1890s. This force reached its climax in the presidential race of 1896, when the national reforms epitomized in the cry for free silver were at issue. Yet despite a number of recent studies, confusion and error regarding the Populists in the crucial election of 1896 still persist. Robert F. Durden, by extensive use of the papers of Marion Butler, Populist senator from North Carolina and national chairman of the party during the campaign, sheds new light upon many points—the conduct of the St. Louis convention, the role of Tom Watson, and the fusion strategy. Durden's work is not only valuable for its clarification of the Populist campaign, but also for the example it offers of the practical working of American politics with the baffling balances among regions and groups.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, three violent national conflicts rocked the Americas: the Wars of Unification in Argentina, the War of the Reform and French Intervention in Mexico, and the Civil War in the United States. The recovery efforts that followed reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas, Evan C. Rothera uses both transnational and comparative methodologies to highlight similarities and differences among the wars and reconstructions in the US, Mexico, and Argentina. In doing so, he uncovers a new history that stresses the degree to which cooperation and collaboration, rather than antagonism and discord, characterized the relationships among the three countries. This study serves as a unique assessment of a crucial period in the history of the Americas and speaks to the perpetual battle between visions of international partnership and isolation.