The Battle of Antietam, which took place on September 17, 1862, remains the single bloodiest day in America's history: more than 3,600 men died in twelve hours of savage fighting, and more than 17,000 were wounded. As a turning point in the Civil War, the narrow Union victory is well-known as the key catalyst for Lincoln to issue his Emancipation Proclamation.

Yet Antietam was not only a battle that dramatically changed the fortunes and meaning of the war; it also changed America in ways we feel today. No army in history wrote so many letters or kept as many diaries as the soldiers who fought in the Civil War, and Stephen Budiansky draws on this rich record to re-create the experiences of those whose lives were forever changed, whether on the battlefield or in trying to make sense of its horrors in the years and decades to follow. Antietam would usher in a new beginning in politics, military strategy, gender roles, battlefield medicine, war photography, and the values and worldview of the postwar generation.

A masterful and fine-grained account of the battle, built around the intimate experiences of nine people whose lives intersected there, A Day in September is a story of war but also, at its heart, a human history, one that encompasses Antietam's enduring legacy.

A prizewinning historian uncovers one of the earliest instances of reparations in America-ironically, though perhaps not surprisingly, paid to slaveholders, not former slaves

"A spectacular achievement of historical research. Forret shows for the first time just how far the American government went to secure reparations."
-Robert Elder' author of Calhoun: American Heretic

In 1831, the American ship Comet, carrying 165 enslaved men, women, and children, crashed onto a coral reef near the shore of the Bahamas, then part of the British Empire. Shortly afterward, the Vice Admiralty Court in Nassau, over the outraged objections of the ship's owners, set the rescued captives free. American slave owners and the companies who insured the liberated human cargo would spend years lobbying for reparations from Great Britain, not for the emancipated slaves, of course, but for the masters deprived of their human property.

In a work of profoundly relevant research and storytelling, historian and Frederick Douglass Prize-winner Jeff Forret uncovers how the Comet incident-as well as similar episodes that unfolded over the next decade-resulted in the British Crown making reparations payments to a U.S. government that strenuously represented slaveholder interests. Through a story that has never been fully explored, The Price They Paid shows how, unlike their former owners and insurers, neither the survivors of the Comet and other vessels, nor their descendants, have ever received reparations for the price they paid in their lives, labor, and suffering during slavery.

Any accounting of reparations today requires a fuller understanding of how the debts of slavery have been paid, and to whom. The Price They Paid represents a major step forward in that effort.

During the Enlightenment, people from the middling sort organised themselves into 56 patriotic societies in Denmark, Norway, and the German duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. The number of members totalled several thousand. They undertook educational and industrial reforms and participated in public debates on the need for social and political modernisation.

The founding of patriotic societies was a widespread European phenomenon and they played a key role in the Nordic Enlightenment. Yet, they have not been the subject of European or national studies before. Their emergence reflected that modern bureaucratic states were in the making, and that public administrative infrastructures and welfare institutions were expanding. These developments created a need to integrate citizens and imbue them with a spirit of community.

This monograph presents the first coherent investigation of the patriotic societies in a large, European multinational and multilingual realm. Its comparative outlook situates the intellectual and cultural developments in the Nordic countries as an integral part of the European Enlightenment. Furthermore, it offers new perspectives on tensions between patriotism, nationalism and universal values as they developed during the Enlightenment, as well as how freedom, the buzzword of the Enlightenment, implied new forms of discipline.

This book explores the intellectual grounds of Scandinavianist ideology and its political development into a national unification movement. Denmark, Norway and Sweden were nearly annihilated during the Napoleonic Wars. The lesson learned was that survival was a matter of size. Whereas their union of 1814 offered Sweden-Norway geostrategic security tempered by fear of Russia, Denmark was the biggest territorial loser of the Napoleonic Wars and faced separatism connected to German nationalism in the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. This evolved into a national conflict that threatened Denmark's survival as a nation. Meanwhile, a new generation of Danes, Swedes and Norwegians had come to regard kindred language, culture and religion as a case for Scandinavian union that could offer protection against Russia and Germany. When the European revolutions of 1848 unleashed the First Schleswig War, the influence of Scandinavianism was such that it nearly turned into a Scandinavian war of unification.

Religion, Science and Moral Philosophy in the Huguenot Enlightenment makes two significant contributions to existing scholarship on the Enlightenment. Firstly, as an author, journalist, translator, and inexhaustible letter writer, the Huguenot pastor and secretary of the Berlin Academy of Science, Samuel Formey, was involved in most of the philosophical debates in the European Republic of Letters during the second half of the eighteenth century. This is the first monograph dedicated solely to Formey's multifaceted work. Secondly, the book recasts the concept of Religious Enlightenment by considering Formey as a pastor-philosopher whose concept of philosophy included revealed religion instead of perpetuating the image of him as an 'enemy of Enlightenment' who opposed the philosophy of his time by referring to religion.

More precisely, the book explores the notion of the compatibility between reason and faith in Formey's thought on the existence of God, the freedom of will, divine providence and other questions relating to religion and metaphysics. It shows how Formey altered his portrayal of the relation between reason and faith depending on the genre and immediate context of his writings. The broader contextualisation of Formey's arguments in German rationalist philosophy and Calvinist theology unveils not only the overlaps between Wolffianism and eighteenth-century Calvinism but also gives an impression of the diversity of the thought of Huguenot pastors and philosophers during the Enlightenment.