Catalog Search Results
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG+ - BL: 9.1 - AR Pts: 10
Language
English
Formats
Description
This is the little-known story of how a newly independent nation was challenged by four Muslim powers and what happened when America's third president decided to stand up to intimidation. When Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, America faced a crisis. The new nation was deeply in debt and needed its economy to grow quickly, but its merchant ships were under attack. Pirates from North Africa's Barbary coast routinely captured American sailors...
Author
Language
English
Description
The gripping story of an epic prairie snowstorm that killed hundreds of newly arrived settlers and cast a shadow on the promise of the American frontier. January 12, 1888, began as an unseasonably warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild that children walked to school without coats and gloves. But that afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed. One moment the air was calm; the next...
Author
Language
English
Description
"In June 1846, General Stephen Watts Kearny rode out of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, with two thousand soldiers, bound for California. At the time, the nation was hell-bent on expansion: James K. Polk had lately won the presidency by threatening England over the borders in Oregon, while Congress had just voted, in defiance of the Mexican government, to annex Texas. After Mexico declared war on the United States, Kearny's Army of the West was sent out,...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nations history. Hurston was there to record Cudjos firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade...
7) The fall of the house of Dixie: the Civil War and the social revolution that transformed the South
Author
Publisher
Random House
Language
English
Description
In this major new history of the Civil War, Bruce Levine tells the riveting story of how that conflict upended the economic, political, and social life of the old South, utterly destroying the Confederacy and the society it represented and defended.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8.5 - AR Pts: 28
Language
English
Description
The account of an unprecedented feat of engineering, vision, and courage. It is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad-the investors who risked their businesses and money; the enlightened politicians who understood its importance; the engineers and surveyors who risked, and sometimes lost, their lives; and the Irish and Chinese immigrants, the defeated Confederate soldiers, and the other laborers who did the backbreaking and...
11) The Canadians
Author
Series
Publisher
Time-Life Books
Language
English
Formats
Description
Discusses the exploration, settlement, and development of Canada from the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth.
Author
Publisher
Random House
Pub. Date
[2010]
Language
English
Description
"After the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869, the rest of the country was up for grabs, and the race was on. The prize: a better, shorter, less snowy route through the corridors of the American Southwest, linking Los Angeles to Chicago. In Rival Rails, Borneman lays out in compelling detail the sectional rivalries, contested routes, political posturing, and ambitious business dealings that unfolded as an increasing number of...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The dramatic story of fugitive slaves and the antislavery activists who defied the law to help them reach freedom. They are little known to history: Sydney Howard Gay, an abolitionist newspaper editor; Louis Napoleon, a furniture polisher; Charles B. Ray, a black minister. At great risk they operated the underground railroad in New York, a city whose businesses, banks, and politics were deeply enmeshed in the slave economy. In secret coordination...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 9.2 - AR Pts: 23
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized Americas rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fairs brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the countrys most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes,...
15) A wild West history of frontier Colorado: pioneers, gunslingers & cattle kings on the eastern plains
Author
Publisher
History Press
Pub. Date
2011.
Language
English
Description
From the Gold Rush to the coming of the railroad, the mid-1800s saw prospectors, desperados and opportunists flock to Colorado. The peaceful frontier quickly transformed into dangerous, lawless territory, where Coloradoans settled their own matters, usually with pistols.
Author
Language
English
Description
The near extinction of the buffalo herds of the Great Plains in the nineteenth century was the product of several factors, including the greed of buffalo hunters, the callousness of "sportsmen," and the desire of the federal government to deprive the Plains Indians of their food source. But the buffalo did (barely) survive, and one of their unlikely saviors was Grinnell, a Brooklyn-born, Yale-educated anthropologist and naturalist. Grinnell was entranced...
17) The invention of murder: how the Victorians revelled in death and detection and created modern crime
Author
Language
English
Description
Publisher's description: In this exploration of murder in the nineteenth century, Judith Flanders explores some of the most gripping cases that fascinated the Victorians and gave rise to the first detective fiction. She retells the gruesome stories of many different types of murder--both famous and obscure--from the crimes (and myths) of Sweeney Todd and Jack the Ripper to the tragedies of the murdered Marr family in London's East End; Burke and Hare...
Author
Publisher
Bloomsbury USA
Language
English
Description
Glenn Frankel, beginning in Hollywood and then returning to the origins of the Cynthia Ann Parker Indian captivity story, creates a rich and nuanced anatomy of a timeless film and a quintessentially American myth that bares the ambiguities surrounding race, sexuality, and violence in the settling of the West and the making of America.
Author
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Language
English
Description
Sylviane A. Diouf reconstructs the lives of 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria who were brought ashore in Alabama in 1860 under cover of night, recounting their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describing their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women. After emancipation, the group reunited from various plantations, bought land, and founded their own settlement, known as African Town....
Author
Publisher
Penguin Press
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Description
"A profound new rendering of the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that resubjugated them, as seen through the prism of the war of images and ideas that have left an enduring racist stain on the American mind. The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century...