By 1838, over two thousand Americans had been killed and many hundreds injured by exploding steam engines on steamboats. After calls for a solution in two State of the Union addresses, a Senate Select Committee met to consider an investigative report from the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia, the first federally funded investigation into a technical.

In Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom Robert Gudmestad offers new insights into the remarkable and significant history of transportation and commerce in the antebellum South. He examines the wide-ranging influence of steamboats on the Southern economy. From carrying cash crops to market, to contributing to slave productivity, increasing the flexibility of labor, and connecting southerners to overlapping orbits of regional, national, and international markets, steamboats not only benefitted slaveholders and northern industries but also affected cotton production.

Presents a chronologically-arranged reference to catastrophic events in American history, including natural disasters, economic depressions, riots, murders, and terrorist attacks.

Rethinking American Disasters is a pathbreaking collection of essays on hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and other calamities in the United States and British colonial America over four centuries. Proceeding from the premise that there is no such thing as a “natural” disaster, the collection invites readers to consider disasters and their aftermaths as artifacts of and vantage points onto their historical contexts.

Contemporary disaster investigation reports into the Shuttle, Three Mile Island, or the World Trade Centre did not happen by chance, but were the result of an evolution of the discourse communities involved with investigating technological accidents. The relationships of private companies, coroners, outside experts, and government investigators all had to be developed and experimented with before a genre of investigation reports could exist. This book is the story of the evolution of these investigation discourse communities in published reports written between 1833 and 1879. Using the reports generated by seven different accidents on railroads and steamboats between 1833 and 1876, it is possible to observe the changes in how these reports interacted and changed over the course of the nineteenth century: The Explosion of the Steamboat New England in the Connecticut River, 1833; The Explosion of the Locomotive Engine Richmond near Reading Pennsylvania, 1844; The Explosion of the Steam Boat Moselle in Cincinatti, 1838; The Camden and Amboy Railroad Collision in Burlington, New Jersey, 1855; The Gasconade Bridge Collapse on the Pacific Railroad in Missouri, 1855; The Eastern Railroad Collision in Revere, Massachusetts, 1871; The Ashtabula Railroad Bridge Collapse in Ohio, 1876

This groundbreaking book is the first to look at administration and administrative law in the earliest days of the American republic. Jerry Mashaw demonstrates that from the very beginning Congress delegated vast discretion to administrative officials and armed them with extrajudicial adjudicatory, rulemaking, and enforcement authority. The legislative and administrative practices of the U.S. Constitution's first century created an administrative constitution hardly hinted at in its formal text. This book, in the author's words, will "demonstrate that there has been no precipitous fall from a historical position of separation-of-powers grace to a position of compromise; there is not a new administrative constitution whose legitimacy should be understood as not only contestable but deeply problematic."

Major help for those inevitable American History term paper projects has arrived to enrich and stimulate students in challenging and enjoyable ways. Students from high school age to undergraduate will be able to get a jumpstart on assignments with the hundreds of term paper projects and research information offered here in an easy-to-use format. Users can quickly choose from the 100 important events of the nineteenth century, carefully selected to be appealing to students, and delve right in. Each event entry begins with a brief summary to pique interest and then offers original and thought-provoking term paper ideas in both standard and alternative formats that incorporate the latest in electronic media, such as iPod and iMovie. The best in primary and secondary sources for further research are then annotated, followed by vetted, stable Web site suggestions and multimedia resources for further viewing and listening. Librarians and faculty will want to use this as well. Students dread term papers, but with this book, the research experience is transformed and elevated. Term Paper Resource Guide to Nineteenth-Century U.S. History is a superb source to motivate and educate students who have a wide range of interests and talents. The provided topics on events, people, inventions, cultural contributions, wars, and technological advances reflect the country's nineteenth-century character and experience. Some examples of the topics are Barbary Pirate Wars, the Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings liaison, Tecumseh and the Prophet, the Santa Fe Trail, Immigration in the 1840s, the Seneca Falls Convention, the Purchase of Alaska, Boss Tweed's Ring, Wyatt Earp and the Gunfight at O.K. Corral, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, and Scott Joplin and Ragtime Music.