Supporters of the 21st-century Tea Party movement claim the Boston Tea Party of 1773 as their inspiration, while scholars dismiss the connection. Neither camp pays much attention to the intervening years, and both overlook one of the great populist movements in American history. As David M. Gold demonstrates, 19th-century Americans who were fed up with reckless government spending, high taxes, and crony capitalism launched a campaign for smaller, more accountable, more transparent government. The movement culminated in state constitutional conventions in all the states of the Old Northwest, and other parts of the country as well, that rewrote the nation’s fundamental law. Citizens and scholars will continue to debate the…

Jim Lewis’ new book on antebellum Alabama joins the History & Heroes Series. The name Alabama comes from the Choctaw word meaning “clearers of the thickets,” inspiring the title of this fascinating new book. It examines Alabama’s early history beginning with the era of European colonization and culminating with the state’s controversial secession from the Union—after just 41 years as a state (recognizing, of course, that the actual history began long before this emigration, with Native American civilizations). In so doing, the author traces how Alabama emerged from a raw frontier of European settlement into a fully functioning state that provided much-needed order to its new citizens. The book begins…

FROM FRONTIER TO PLANTATION IN TENNESSEE is the classic book by late UVa professor of history Thomas Perkins Abernethy about the formative years of Tennessee and its  early political leadership. Now republished in a quality paperback edition without underlines and distracting stray marks, it has been Digitally Remastered to restore missing parts of words, cleaner text, and more consistently legible footnotes. Abernethy studied a time when Tennessee was the original Wild West and a laboratory for U.S. expansion and repopulation–the first new state born out of a territory. Answering the idealized histories that had uncritically praised the democracticizing effects of the Frontier in American history, Abernethy discusses such leaders as…

John Torrey Morse’s beloved biography of Benjamin Franklin, originally published in 1889 in the American Statesmen Series, is presented as a quality new paperback. The Digitally Remastered™ edition removes underlines and distracting stray marks, repairs missing parts of words, and is presented with enhanced, clearer text as compared to most such republications today. It even includes page one, unlike most modern reprints. Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) was America’s original Renaissance Man. Most noted as one of the country’s Founding Fathers, the first Postmaster General, and a statesman, he was also an accomplished writer, printer, scientist, inventor, and musician. He was quite simply “The First American.” Morse’s entertaining biography of the great…