I stumbled across this book in the library. A few pages into it I decided I just had to own it. While reading it I'm saying to myself either, "Yes, that's how it was for my ancestors!" or "Wow, I never considered the role of religion/land grant systems/whatever on the decisions my people made."

This book tells how past cultural trends, local conditions, and historical events affected ordinary people and shows clearly that in order to know the people, we have to know the history.

This is not the book of an amateur genealogist but of a professional historian -- deeply researched, well reasoned, and skillfully written. A very satisfying book.

I found this book to be fascinating! If you want to see how genealogical research can produce compelling American history, this is the book to read. For example, I grew up in Los Angeles, and had no appreciation for the 1850s' bloody struggle over the extension of slavery into territories before they reached statehood until I read <>. I also didn't realize that southern Ohio (largely settled by Virginians who came overland and down the Ohio River) and northern Ohio (largely settled by New Englanders who came west via the Erie Canal and Lake Erie) had such radically different views on slavery. Before I read <>, events such as the Compromise of 1850, the Missouri Compromise, the Dred Scott decision and John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry were just bland factoids I had memorized for tests in my high-school American History class. Now I see them as the tips of a huge iceberg that tore into this country's fabric long before the greycoats shelled Fort Sumter, and could well have sunk it. This book puts the disembodied events we studied with little interest and less understanding in our American History textbooks into the context of individual families' lives. These families' struggles, their fateful decisions, their hopes for their children, their successes and their disappointments all leap from every page of this riveting study. American history will never look the same to me after this book.