19th century 
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There are a total of 302 valid entries on the list.
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"ABE is a cultural biography of Abraham Lincoln, following Lincoln's monumental life from cradle to grave while weaving a narrative that includes Lincoln's cultural influences and the nation-wide and regional cultural trends and moods and happenings of his day, and how Lincoln both shaped and was shaped by his America. The music, humor, literature, and fashions of the time and their impact on Lincoln's life are explored as well, and analysis of other...
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Through the extraordinary life of Angelica Schuyler Church, a politically astute and socially influential figure, this story reveals how women shaped early American history through diplomacy, personal networks, and a strategic presence in key revolutionary moments.
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"A landmark biography of Charles Sumner, the unsung hero of the American Civil War and Reconstruction Charles Sumner is mainly known as the statesman who barely survived a brutal caning on the Senate floor by the slaveholder Preston Brooks in 1856. This violent episode has obscured Sumner's epic life as one of America's most visionary constitutional thinkers, a man who advocated for multiracial democracy and championed equal rights more than one hundred...
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"Written by one of the world's leading experts on the life and literature of Edgar Allan Poe, this biography is a rich and rewarding study for the general reader as well as for the seasoned scholar. Richard Kopley combines a biographical narrative of Poe's enduring challenges-including his difficult foster father, his personal losses, his great struggles with depression and alcoholism, and the poverty that dogged his existence-with close readings...
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"The absorbing narrative of Frederick Douglass's heated struggle with President Andrew Johnson reveals a new perspective on Reconstruction's demise. When Andrew Johnson rose to the presidency after Abraham Lincoln's assassination, African Americans were optimistic that Johnson would pursue aggressive federal policies for Black equality. Just a year earlier, Johnson had cast himself as a 'Moses' for the Black community. Frederick Douglass, the country's...
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Average Rating:
4 stars
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"Three noted Texan writers combine forces to tell the real story of the Alamo, dispelling the myths, exploring why they had their day for so long, and explaining why the ugly fight about its meaning is now coming to a head... In the past forty-some years, waves of revisionists have come at this topic, and at times have made real progress toward a more nuanced and inclusive story that doesn't alienate anyone. But we are not living in one of those times;...
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"A definitive, sweeping account of the Underground Railroad's long-overlooked maritime origins, from a pre-eminent scholar of Atlantic history and the award-winning author of The Slave Ship As many as 100,000 enslaved people fled successfully from the horrors of bondage in the antebellum South, finding safe harbor along a network of passageways across North America now known as the Underground Railroad. Yet imagery of fugitives ushered clandestinely...
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"The Wild West gunfighter is such a stock figure in our popular culture that some dismiss it all as a corny myth, more a product of dime novels and B movies than a genuinely important American history. In fact, as Bryan Burrough shows us in his dazzling and fast-paced new book, there's much more below the surface. For three decades at the end of the 1800s, a big swath of the American West was a crucible of change, with the highest murder rate per...
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Average Rating:
5 stars
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"From rare book dealer and guest star of the hit show Pawn Stars, a page-turning literary adventure that introduces readers to the women writers who inspired Jane Austen [Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, Hannah More, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth]--and investigates why their books have disappeared from our shelves"--
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"Drawing from an archive of nearly five thousand letters and advertisements, the riveting, dramatic story of formerly enslaved people who spent years searching for family members stolen away during slavery."--
11. The lost wife
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Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
"Minnesota, 1862: As a woman fleeing from a dark and secret past, Sarah Wakefield leaves Rhode Island quietly and quickly under cover of night for the long journey to Minnesota where she has been advised there is good work to be had. She soon finds a husband who becomes a resident physician for a Sioux town there but the political backdrop of that moment is volatile: white settlers are breaking treaties, Native American land is shrinking, and mass...
12. Mark Twain
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Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
"Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, under Halley's Comet, the rambunctious Twain was an early teller of tall tales. He left his home in Missouri at an early age, piloted steamboats on the Mississippi, and arrived in the Nevada Territory during the silver-mining boom. Before long, he had accepted a job at the local newspaper, where he barged into vigorous discourse and debate, hoaxes and hijinks. After moving to San Francisco, he published stories...
13. Miss Austen
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Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
"England, 1840. For the two decades following the death of her beloved sister, Jane, Cassandra Austen has lived alone, spending her days visiting friends and relations and quietly, purposefully working to preserve her sister's reputation. Now in her sixties and increasingly frail, Cassandra goes to stay with the Fowles of Kintbury, family of her long-dead fiancé, in search of a trove of Jane's letters. Dodging her hostess and a meddlesome housemaid,...
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On February 3, 1889, just two days shy of her forty-first birthday, Myra Maybelle Shirley--better known at that point by her outlaw sobriquet "Belle Starr"--was blown from her horse saddle and killed by a pair of shotgun blasts, delivered by an unseen assailant, only a few miles away from her home in the Indian Territory of present-day Oklahoma. Thus ended the life of one of the most colorful, authentic, and dangerous women in the history of the American...
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Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
In September 1883, the South Australian town of Fairly huddles under strange, vivid sunsets. Six-year-old Denny Wallace has gone missing during a dust storm, and the whole town is intent on finding him. As they search the desert and mountains for the lost child, the residents of Fairly--newlyweds, landowners, farmers, mothers, artists, Indigenous trackers, cameleers, children, schoolteachers, widows, maids, policemen--explore their own relationships...
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Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders guides the reader through seven classic Russian short stories he's been teaching for twenty years as a professor in the prestigious Syracuse University graduate MFA creative writing program. Paired with stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, these essays are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it's more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. Saunders approaches...