Daniel Aaron, one of todays foremost scholars of American history and American studies, began his career in 1942 with this classic study of Cincinnati in frontier days. Aaron argues that the Queen City quickly became an important urban center that in many ways resembled eastern cities more than its own hinterlands, with a populace united by its desire for economic growth. Aaron traces Cincinnati's development as a mercantile and industrial center during a period of intense national political and social ferment. The city owed much of its success as an urban center to its strategic location on the Ohio River and easy access to fertile backcountry. Despite an early over-reliance on commerce and land speculation and neglect of manufacturing, by 1838 Cincinnati's basic industries had been established and the city had outstripped her Ohio River rivals. Aaron's account of Cincinnati during this tumultuous period details the ways in which Cincinnatians made the most of commerce and manufacturing, how they met their civic responsibilities, and how they survived floods, fires, and cholera. He goes on to discuss the social and cultural history of the city during this period, including the development of social hierarchies, the operations of the press, the rage for founding societies of all kinds, the response of citizens to national and international events, the commercial elite's management of radicals and nonconformists, the nature of popular entertainment and serious culture, the efforts of education, and the messages of religious institutions. For historians, particularly those interested in urban and social history, Daniel Aaron's view of Cincinnati offers a rare opportuniry to viewantebellum American society in a microcosm, along with all of the institutions and attitudes that were prevalent in urban America during this important time.

Reassessing the archive of the Black Hawk War, The Corpse in the Kitchen explores relationships between the enclosure of Indigenous land, histories of resource extraction, and the literary culture of settler colonialism. While conventional histories of the Black Hawk War have long treated the conflict as gratuitous, Adam John Waterman argues that the war part of a struggle over the dispensation of mineral resources specifically, mineral lead—and the emergence of new cultures of killing and composition. The elemental basis for the fabrication of bullets, lead drawn from the mines of the upper Mississippi, contributed to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples through the consolidation of U.S. control over a vital military resource. Rendered as metallic type, Mississippian lead contributed to the expansion of print culture, providing the occasion for literary justifications of settler violence, and promulgating the fiction of Indigenous disappearance. Treating the theft and excarnation of Black Hawk’s corpse as coextensive with processes of mineral extraction, Waterman explores ecologies of racial capitalism as forms of inscription, documentary traces written into the land. Reading the terrestrial in relation to more conventional literary forms, he explores the settler fetishization of Black Hawk’s body, drawing out homoerotic longings that suffuse representations of the man and his comrades. Moving from print to agriculture as modes of inscription, Waterman looks to the role of commodity agriculture in composing a history of settler rapine, including literal and metaphoric legacies of anthropophagy. Traversing mouth and stomach, he concludes by contrasting forms of settler medicine with Black Hawk’s account of medicine as an embodied practice, understood in relation to accounts of dreaming and mourning, processes that are unforgivably slow and that allow time for the imagination of other futures, other ways of being.

Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the dialogue of religious skepticism and faith shaped struggles over the place of religion in politics. It produced different visions of knowledge and education in an "enlightened" society. It fueled social reform in an era of economic transformation, territorial expansion, and social change. Ultimately, as Christopher Grasso argues in this definitive work, it molded the making and eventual unmaking of American nationalism. Religious skepticism has been rendered nearly invisible in American religious history, which often stresses the evangelicalism of the era or the "secularization" said to be happening behind people's backs, or assumes that skepticism was for intellectuals and ordinary people who stayed away from church were merely indifferent. Certainly the efforts of vocal "infidels" or "freethinkers" were dwarfed by the legions conducting religious revivals, creating missions and moral reform societies, distributing Bibles and Christian tracts, and building churches across the land. Even if few Americans publicly challenged Christian truth claims, many more quietly doubted, and religious skepticism touched--and in some cases transformed--many individual lives. Commentators considered religious doubt to be a persistent problem, because they believed that skeptical challenges to the grounds of faith--the Bible, the church, and personal experience--threatened the foundations of American society. Skepticism and American Faith examines the ways that Americans--ministers, merchants, and mystics; physicians, schoolteachers, and feminists; self-help writers, slaveholders, shoemakers, and soldiers--wrestled with faith and doubt as they lived their daily lives and tried to make sense of their world.

Chopped in salads, scooped up in salsa, slathered on pizza and pasta, squeezed onto burgers and fries, and filling aisles with roma, cherry, beefsteak, on-the-vine, and heirloom: where would American food, fast and slow, high and low, be without the tomato? The tomato represents the best and worst of American cuisine: though the plastic-looking corporate tomato is the hallmark of industrial agriculture, the tomato’s history also encompasses farmers’ markets and home gardens. Garden Variety illuminates American culinary culture from 1800 to the present, challenging a simple story of mass-produced homogeneity and demonstrating the persistence of diverse food cultures throughout modern America. John Hoenig explores the path by which, over the last two centuries, the tomato went from a rare seasonal crop to America’s favorite vegetable. He pays particular attention to the noncorporate tomato. During the twentieth century, as food production, processing, and distribution became increasingly centralized, the tomato remained king of the vegetable garden and, in recent years, has become the centerpiece of alternative food cultures. Reading seed catalogs, menus, and cookbooks, and following the efforts of cooks and housewives to find new ways to prepare and preserve tomatoes, Hoenig challenges the extent to which branding, advertising, and marketing dominated twentieth-century American life. He emphasizes the importance of tomatoes to numerous immigrant groups and their influence on the development of American food cultures. Garden Variety highlights the limits on corporations’ ability to shape what we eat, inviting us to rethink the history of our foodways and to take the opportunity to expand the palate of American cuisine.