1800-1860: Government and Politics: Publications

George Bancroft, The History of the United States from the Discovery of the Continent (Boston: Little, Brown, 1834)—the first of a ten-volume history by Bancroft, a Jacksonian Democrat and one of the first Americans to obtain a doctoral degree; the last volume appeared in 1875;

Nicholas Biddle, History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clarke, 2 volumes, edited by Paul Allen (Philadelphia: Bradford & Inskeep / New York: Abm. H. Inskeep, J. Maxwell, printer, 1814)—the genuine published version of the journals kept by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their three-year exploration of the Louisiana Purchase in 1804–1806;

David Crockett, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee (Philadelphia: E. L. Cary & A. Hart, 1834)—an assortment of episodes about the frontier adventurer Davy Crockett. Spawned numerous almanacs and books that spun even taller tales about the larger-than-life frontiersman;

James Russell Lowell, The Bigelow Papers (Cambridge, Mass.: Nichols/New York: Putnam’s, 1848)—the philosophical doggerel of a rustic Yankee invented by Lowell, an abolitionist poet, to chastise the Mexican War and slavery’s expansion;

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, 2 volumes (Boston: Jewett / Cleveland: Jewett, Proctor, & Worthington, 1852)—a popular sentimental novel about the cruelties of slavery that had a profound impact on public opinion in the North and West;

Alexis de Tocqueville, De la democratie en Amerique, 2 volumes (London: Saunders & Otley, 1835-1840)—observations written by a French nobleman who, with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, traveled in the United States in 1831-1832. It has important firsthand accounts of Indian removal, slavery, and Western life.