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In the mid-1850s, Texas slaveholders estimated that some 4,000 fugitive slaves had escaped south to Mexico. This chapter broadly examines the process in which runaway slaves from Texas escaped to Mexico. Specifically, it explores how they learned about freedom south of the border, the types of supplies they gathered for their escape attempts, and the ways in which Texas’s vast landscape shaped their experiences. It argues that the routes that led fugitive slaves to freedom in Mexico were a part of a precarious southern Underground Railroad, but one that operated in the absence of formal networks or a well-organized abolitionist movement. The chapter centers on fugitive slaves’ efforts toward self-emancipation and navigate contested spaces of slavery and freedom with little assistance and under difficult conditions. It sheds new light on the history of runaway slaves by examining the ways in which American westward expansion and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands shaped the fugitive slave experience in the nineteenth century.

This chapter introduces the religious tensions created in Nauvoo, Illinois, by the return of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism) to the region in the twentieth century and their historical restoration of the city that was once their headquarters. It places the restoration project, patterned after the historical recreation of Colonial Williamsburg, within the larger trend of memorials that swept across America in the twentieth century. Overviewing other studies, it positions historic Nauvoo as a case study in historical tourism and pilgrimage. Finally, it examines how Mormonism used restored Nauvoo as a staging ground for celebrating American westward expansion to position the faith within a larger national narrative.

This chapter examines the history of yellow fever, the role it played in shaping slavery in the United States, and its part in the country’s westward expansion. Yellow fever was an endemic disease of West Africa that traveled to the New World and elsewhere aboard trading ships with their cargoes of slaves. The black African peoples, although easily infected, nevertheless withstood the effects in that fewer died from the infection than Caucasians, American Indians, or Asians. Ironically, as smallpox and measles devastated natives along the Caribbean coast and islands, growing numbers of African slaves were brought to replace those plantation laborers. When the value of Africans over natives became apparent, by virtue of the blacks’ resistance to yellow fever, the importation of these Africans increased still further. Because it was so lethal to susceptible humans, yellow fever actually disrupted exploration into the Caribbean. In fact, American expansion became possible only after a team led by Walter Reed arrived in Cuba to combat the disease and prove it was transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

This chapter explores the ecological regime of slavery and the land-use practices employed by farmers across the antebellum South. Despite the diverse ecologies and crop regimes of the region, most southern farmers employed a set of extensive agricultural techniques that kept the cost of farming down and helped circumvent natural limits on crop production and stock-raising. The use of shifting cultivation, free-range animal husbandry, and slaves to perform erosion control masked the environmental impacts of farmers’ actions, at least temporarily. Debates over westward expansion during the sectional crisis of the 1850s were not just about the extension of slavery, they also reflected practical concerns regarding access to new lands and fresh soil. Both were necessary for the continued profitability of farming in the South.

Focusing on westward expansion, this chapter studies antebellum warnings that frontier conflicts would cause civil war. It shows how diverging material cultures divided northerners and southerners in the West, the region that Americans associated with the future. Southern settlers wielded bowie knives to threaten aggressive filibusters and manly conquests for slavery. Northern emigrants concealed arms in crates to project how a civilized culture and prosperous economy would preserve the territories for freedom. These material cultures clashed at the Battle of Black Jack when John Brown captured Henry Clay Pate and stole his bowie knife. Black Jack was the first battle between northerners and southerners over slavery.

This chapter addresses U.S. policies furthering expansion to the Pacific Coast in order to establish the nation as a Pacific commercial power through trade with China. Such policies gave rise to an increasingly intense debate over the admission of Chinese immigrants. Led by Senator and then Secretary of State William Seward, Republicans maintained liberal immigration policies for the Chinese, especially through the Burlingame Treaty (1868). While leaders from California and other western states called for but were unable to gain national support for Chinese exclusion, they were able to prevent the naturalization of Chinese immigrants.

Chapter 5 explores how local and regional historians in eighteenth and nineteenth-century New England appropriated memories of colonial women’s war making to help shape new gender ideologies, national identities, and westward expansion policies in the first decades of the American republic. As part of a larger trend that saw many Americans embrace ideas of separate, gendered public and private spheres and roles for women as republican mothers, historians writing a new national history for a new nation drew on stories of colonial heroines. To better fit their stories into increasingly popular ideas about women’s place in a private, domestic sphere, these authors reworked accounts of colonial women’s war making, transforming essential martial public actors into resolute mothers who served as the last line of defense of the home in historical memory.

The gun control debate is often cast as if there were two options: we either have it or we don’t. This is a mistake. Our real options lie along five different, albeit overlapping, continua. The first three concern public policy: who should be permitted to have which firearms, and how should we regulate the guns we permit people to have. The fourth and fifth continua concern prudential and moral judgments: whether it would be wise or moral for people to own firearms independently of the how we answer the policy questions. I outline the history of firearms from their inception into the early twentieth century. I explain when and where they were initially used, how they were refined and developed, and why they played a special role in the history of the United States. This history isolates three key facts about firearms that inform the gun control debate.

This chapter explores the role of the American Bible Society (ABS) in distributing the Bible to Italian, Polish, Swedish, and other immigrants coming to American shores at the turn of the twentieth century. The ABS believed that it was essential to bring the Bible to these immigrants in order to assimilate them to an American way of life and bring them into the Protestant faith. Similar tactics of assimilation were used by the ABS in the American West as Bible salesman and ABS agents encountered native American populations, Mormons, and those heading to California in search of gold.