In 1883, Albion W. Tourgée, the author of the bestselling novel A Fool's Errand (1879), published Hot Plowshares, a novel about the rise of antislavery activity in New York State from 1848 to the outbreak of the Civil War. His New York publisher—Fords, Howard, & Hulbert—presented the novel as part of “Tourgée's American Historical Novels” series, placing the novel's title beneath the name of the series on both the cover and spine. In advertisements in the back pages of Tourgée subsequent books, both fiction and nonfiction, the publisher highlighted the series as “The Story of an Epoch,” seven novels in total with the publication of Black Ice in 1885. The ad on the back pages of Tourgée's Murvale Eastman: Christian Socialist (1891), for instance, refers to the series as “A Word-Painting of the Spirit of Our Age,” and describes it as “an extraordinary line of Novels, graphically presenting the...
