Category Archives: American History

The Ten-Year Gap: Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder in the Documentary Record, the Little House Novels, and the Television Series

Posted on July 25, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract The age difference between Laura Elizabeth Ingalls and Almanzo James Wilder was approximately ten years — a gap that the Little House novels reduce, at their most extreme, to five. This paper establishes what the documentary record actually shows … Continue reading →

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Feeding the March: Sherman’s Georgia and Carolinas Campaigns as a Recovery of Early Modern Logistics: A White Paper

Posted on July 25, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract The logistical arrangements of William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea (November–December 1864) and Carolinas campaign (January–April 1865) are routinely described as an innovation — the birth of modern operational war, the ancestor of the motorized deep thrust, the … Continue reading →

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Measuring Absence: Why Combat Participation Rate Requires Decomposition: Perryville, Antietam, and the Causes of Non-Engagement: A follow-up to “Battles Decided Before They Were Fought”

Posted on July 24, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract The preceding paper proposed combat participation rate — the share of a mustered force that actually made contact — as a diagnostic tool for identifying battles settled by pre-battle negotiation rather than tactical decision. At Bosworth and Sekigahara, a … Continue reading →

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The Human Toll of the Westport Campaign: An Estimate of Confederate Attrition During Price’s Missouri Expedition, September–December 1864

Posted on July 22, 2026 by nathanalbright

Executive summary Sterling Price’s Army of Missouri entered its home state in mid-September 1864 with roughly twelve thousand men, of whom perhaps a third carried no weapon. Ten weeks and some fourteen hundred miles later, the force that re-crossed into … Continue reading →

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Paper 12 — The Late Twentieth Century and After: Exile, Gentrification, and the Contest over Memory, 1959–Present

Posted on July 20, 2026 by nathanalbright

Introduction This final paper carries the history of Tampa’s working people from the mid-twentieth century into the present and, in doing so, draws together the arguments of the whole series. It has four subjects, each connected to the themes developed … Continue reading →

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Paper 11 — Civil Rights and the Bulldozer: Black Freedom and the Destruction of Neighborhoods, 1945–1975

Posted on July 20, 2026 by nathanalbright

Introduction The postwar decades brought to Tampa two great upheavals that this paper treats together, because they were bound up with each other in the lives of the city’s working people and especially its Black community. The first was the … Continue reading →

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Paper 10 — Collapse, Depression, and War: The Unmaking of the Cigar City, 1920s–1945

Posted on July 20, 2026 by nathanalbright

Introduction The world that the preceding papers described—the booming cigar city, its striving immigrant families, its great mutual-aid societies, its proud and militant craftsmen, its women holding households and institutions together—did not last. Beginning in the 1920s and accelerating through … Continue reading →

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Paper 9 — Women’s Tampa: Wage-Earners, Organizers, and the Backbone of Community Life, 1880s–1940s

Posted on July 20, 2026 by nathanalbright

Introduction Through the eight papers of this series, women have appeared again and again at the load-bearing points of Tampa’s history—the Tocobaga women whose shellfish harvest built the middens, the frontier wives who ran the farms while the men went … Continue reading →

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Paper 8 — Vigilantes, Jim Crow, and the Color Line: Repression and Black Survival, 1880s–1930s

Posted on July 20, 2026 by nathanalbright

Introduction The previous paper reconsidered the cigar workers’ militancy and its costs. This one turns to the force that met that militancy—the employer-backed repression and vigilante violence that ran through Tampa’s history—and to the broader system of racial control, Jim … Continue reading →

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Paper 7 — The Insurgent City, Reconsidered: Radical Labor and Its Costs, 1899–1931

Posted on July 20, 2026 by nathanalbright

Introduction Ybor City is famous, above all, for its labor militancy. In the standard telling it is a heroic place—a stronghold of anarchists and socialists, a city of strikes, a Latin island of working-class radicalism defying the bosses and the … Continue reading →

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