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Author
Language
English
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Description
"Dodge City, Kansas, is a place of legend. The town that started as a small military site exploded with the coming of the railroad, cattle drives, eager miners, settlers, and various entrepreneurs passing through to populate the expanding West. Before long, Dodge City's streets were lined with saloons and brothels and its populace was thick with gunmen, horse thieves, and desperadoes of every sort. By the 1870s, Dodge City was known as the most violent...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"John Sedgwick recounts the decade-long fight between General William J. Palmer, the Civil War hero leading the 'little family' of his Rio Grande, coming down from Denver, hoping to showcase the majesty of the Rockies, and William Barstow Strong, the hard-nosed manager of the corporate-minded Santa Fe, venturing west from Kansas. What begins as an accidental rivalry when the two lines cross in Colorado soon evolves into an all-out battle as each man...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"In the late 1800s, the city of Austin, Texas was on the cusp of emerging from an isolated Western outpost into a truly cosmopolitan metropolis. But beginning in December 1884, Austin was terrorized by someone equally as vicious and, in some ways, far more diabolical than London's infamous Jack the Ripper. For almost exactly one year, the Midnight Assassin crisscrossed the entire city, striking on moonlit nights, using axes, knives, and long steel...
Author
Language
English
Description
"The definitive, dramatic biography of the most important African-American of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era. As a young man Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major...
Author
Publisher
Verso
Pub. Date
2017.
Language
English
Description
Although later made an icon of "rugged individualism," the American cowboy was a grossly exploited and underpaid seasonal worker, who waged a series of militant strikes in the generally isolated and neglected corners of the Old West. Mark Lause examines those neglected labour conflicts, couching them in the context of the bitter and violent "range wars" that broke out periodically across the region, and locating both among the political insurgencies...
Author
Publisher
Viking
Pub. Date
[2016]
Language
English
Description
"A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian's provocative reinterpretation of the eight decades surrounding the Civil War (and leading into the twentieth century); the next volume in the Penguin History of the United States, edited by Eric Foner. In this ambitious story of American imperial conquest and capitalist development, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Steven Hahn takes on the conventional histories of the nineteenth century and offers a perspective...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"A president who governed a divided country has much to teach us in a twenty-first-century moment of polarization and political crisis. Abraham Lincoln was president when implacable secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions inextricably bound up with money, power, race, identity, and faith. He was hated and hailed, excoriated and revered. In Lincoln we can see the possibilities of the presidency as well as its limitations. At once familiar...
Author
Publisher
Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group
Pub. Date
2016.
Language
English
Description
"An acclaimed historian explodes the myth about the 'special relationship' between Americans and their guns, revealing that savvy 19th century businessmen--not gun lovers--created American gun culture"--
Author
Pub. Date
[2018]
Language
English
Formats
Description
Thomas Jefferson fathered three girls: two white and free, one black and a slave. This book about Martha, Maria, and Harriet tells the fascinating story of their very different lives at Monticello and beyond, as daughters of one of our most brilliant and complicated Founding Fathers
Author
Publisher
Da Capo
Pub. Date
2017.
Language
English
Description
"An exquisitely written, comprehensive biography of Chester A. Arthur, our virtually forgotten 21st president, who unexpectedly occupied the nation's highest office and surprised everyone with his moral character and reformist policies"--Provided by publisher.
"When President James Garfield was shot, no one in the United States was more dismayed than his Vice President, Chester Arthur. For years Arthur had been perceived as unfit to govern, not only...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The story of the Astors is a quintessentially American story--of ambition, invention, destruction, and reinvention. From 1783, when German immigrant John Jacob Astor first arrived in the United States, until 2009, when Brooke Astor's son, Anthony Marshall, was convicted of defrauding his elderly mother, the Astor name occupied a unique place in American society. The family fortune, first made by a beaver trapping business that grew into an empire,...
Author
Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
Pub. Date
[2021]
Language
English
Description
"The Power of Scenery tells the story of how America's national parks came to be, with Frederick Law Olmsted's insights and energy serving to link three jewels: Yosemite National Park, Yellowstone National Park, and Niagara Falls State Park"--
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"From the National Book Award-winning and best-selling author Timothy Egan comes the epic story of one of the most fascinating and colorful Irishman in nineteenth-century America. The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against...
Author
Publisher
TwoDot
Pub. Date
[2018]
Language
English
Description
Theodore Roosevelt's time spent in the Western Dakota Territory helped him recover from an overwhelming personal loss, but more importantly, it transformed him into the man etched onto Mount Rushmore, a man still rated as one of the top five Presidents in American history. Michael Blake details how the land, the people, and the Western code of honor had an enormous impact on Theodore and how this experience influenced him in his later years.
Author
Publisher
Simon & Schuster
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Description
"In this magisterial biography, C.W. Goodyear charts the life and times of one of the most remarkable Americans ever to win the Presidency. Progressive firebrand and conservative compromiser; Union war hero and founder of the first Department of Education; Supreme Court attorney and abolitionist preacher; mathematician and canalman; crooked election-fixer and clean-government champion; Congressional chieftain and gentleman-farmer; the last president...
Author
Publisher
Simon & Schuster
Pub. Date
[2011]
Language
English
Description
"This portrait of Johnny Appleseed restores the flesh-and-blood man beneath the many myths. It captures the boldness of an iconic American life and the sadness of his last years, as the frontier marched past him, ever westward. And it shows how death liberated the legend and made of Johnny a barometer of the nation's feelings about its own heroic past and the supposed Eden it once had been. It is a book that does for America's inner frontier what...
Author
Publisher
Simon & Schuster
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
"Drawing on the latest scholarship, this excellent history by a distinguished scholar of women's history chronicles the long struggle by women to gain the right to vote, with profiles of the key figures in the campaign, published for the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage"--