20th century (fino al 1945)

Today, vaudeville is imagined as a parade of slapstick comedians, blackface shouters, coyly revealed knees, and second-rate acrobats. But vaudeville was also America’s most popular commercial amuseme …

“Crisp, clear, eloquent.” –Kim Phillips-Fein, New Republic An “elegantly argued and meticulously documented” (Timothy Noah, New York Times Book Review) account of the postwar struggle over the proper …

Uses previously unstudied Coast Guard records for New York City and environs to examine the development of Rum Row and smuggling in New York City during Prohibition. With the passage of the Eighteent …

Through his many books on the history of anarchism, Paul Avrich has done much to dispel the public’s conception of the anarchists as mere terrorists. In Anarchist Voices, Avrich lets American anarchi …

Canaan, Dim and Far argues for the importance of Pittsburgh as a case study in analyzing African American civil rights and political advocacy in an urban setting. Focusing on the period from the Prog …

Bedlam erupted among 1, 500 ecstatic supporters when Bobby and Ethel Kennedy appeared. Looking tanned and rested, he stepped to the rostrum and pulled from his breast pocket an envelope on which he h …

The immigration station at New York’s Ellis Island opened in 1892 and remained the largest U.S. port for immigrant entry until World War I. In popular memory, Ellis Island is typically seen as a gate …

The Sultana was a sidewheel Mississippi steamboat carrying almost two thousand recently-released Union prisoners-of-war back north at the end of the Civil War. At 2:00 a.m. on April 27, 1865, when th …

Living the Dream tells the history behind the establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the battle over King’s legacy that continued through the decades that followed. Creating the first nation …

The struggle over the fortified Confederate position known as Spotsylvania’s Mule Shoe was without parallel during the Civil War. A Union assault that began at 4:30 A.M. on May 12, 1864, sparked brut …