American Western History

Billy the Kid once said that he killed 22 men - one for each year that he lived. While it’s more likely that he only killed eight or nine, this young outlaw was clearly deadly. But his brief and brutal life reveals how his tragic existence led him into a life of crime. After growing up in poverty as an Irish immigrant in New York City and losing his father at a young age, Billy the Kid had to endure losing his mother when he was only 15.

The 19th century saw the rise of one of the largest, most powerful empires of the modern era. The sun never set on the British Empire, whose holdings spanned the globe, in one form or another. Its naval supremacy linked the Commonwealth of Canada with the colonies in South Africa and India, and through them trade flowed east and west. An integral but underutilized part of this vast trade network included China, a reclusive Asian kingdom closed off from the Western world that desired none of its goods.

In the year 1850, an adolescent Filipina girl is captured by marauding pirates and tossed into a whirlpool of turmoil. Emerging from her misfortune, she finds herself bravely traversing from Hawaii to The Cascade Mountains and onward into the American Old West. By chance, she stumbles upon a treasure of gold extracted by Chinese miners,and hidden before the Chelan Chinese Massacre.. Fate and her quest to return to the Philippines push her onward. Saddle your horse and hang on as you follow her down the path of her adventure! The trail is laced with actual historical events and Native ...

A Minneapolis Reporter follows the boyhood dream to see Where Goes The River. On Memorial Day, 1925, he embarked from the headwaters of the Mississippi River-Lake Itasca, and spent the next 105 days on the river, becoming the first person to have made the complete 2500-mile journey by canoe. Averaging nearly 30 miles per day Tousley and his three separate companions, endured the elements and enjoyed the mighty grandeur of the river in the only way that one can truly experience it. . . by canoe. A 17-foot wood and canvas beauty named Charles H. Curly of St. Paul their canoe bore the brunt of...

Vice House: Presidential Vice and its Impact on American History takes listeners behind the scenes of the White House to uncover the vices, scandals, and moral failings that have shaped the nation’s highest office. From the Founding Fathers to modern presidents, this book delves into the personal lives of America’s leaders to reveal how their choices influenced policy, public opinion, and the course of history.

The Undiscovered Country strips away the layers of myth to reveal the true story of the American West. From the forests of Pennsylvania and Kentucky to the snow-crested California Sierras, and from the harsh deserts of the Southwest to the buffalo range of the Great Plains, Paul Andrew Hutton masterfully chronicles a story that defined America and its people. From Braddock’s 1755 defeat to the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, he unfolds a grand narrative steeped in romantic impulses and tragic consequences.

Walking to Hell is the story of Ezekial McNair, a description of his Tom Sawyer-like upbringing and his life in the Confederate infantry, fighting in a war he didn’t understand, for a cause he didn’t know, but confident it was his path to heroism and glory. He did become a hero, but only by accident, in a battle that would haunt him his entire life.

Drawing from a wide array of materials, Ian C. Hope refutes earlier charges of a lack of professionalization in the antebellum American army and an overreliance on the teachings of Swiss military theorist Antoine de Jomini. Instead, Hope shows that inculcation in West Point's American military curriculum eventually came to provide the army with an officer corps that shared a common doctrine and common skill in military problem solving.

Granbury's Texas Brigade explores the motivations behind the unit's decision to continue to fight, even as it faced demoralizing defeats and Confederate collapse. Using a vast array of letters, diaries, and regimental documents, Lundberg offers provocative insight into the minds of the unit's men and commanders. The caliber of that leadership, he concludes, led to the group's overall high morale.

In 1980, Exxon U.S.A., the world's largest corporation, began development of a five-billion-dollar oil shale industry in the pristine Colorado River Valley. Within eighteen months, Exxon had canceled its elaborate Colony project and 2,100 workers were immediately laid off. Boomtown Blues chronicles the social, environmental, and economic havoc created by one of the most expensive boom and bust cycles in the history of the American West.

Do you want to learn about King Philip’s War but don’t have the time or patience to read a thick book? Then this short and concise book “King Philip’s War: A Short History of New England’s Bloodiest Struggle” is for you!! In this book you will read about: Concise, Engaging History – Designed for the busy reader, this book delivers a gripping account of King Philip’s War in under an hour, part of the bestselling 30-Minute Book Series. The Bloodiest War of Colonial America – Learn how this 17th-century conflict became the deadliest war per capita in American history, ...

In this cutting-edge interpretation of the late 19th-century United States, Cameron Blevins argues that the US Post wove together two of the era's defining projects: western expansion and the growth of state power. Between the 1860s and the early 1900s, the western United States underwent a truly dramatic reorganization of people, land, capital, and resources. Paper Trails maps the spread of the US Post using a dataset of more than 100,000 post offices, revealing a new picture of the federal government in the West.

Do you want to learn about the artist Benjamin West but don’t have the time or patience to read a thick book? Then this is the short and concise book for you! Grew up in colonial Pennsylvania and with little formal instruction became a portrait painter at a very young age. The first American artist to travel to Italy to study the art of the great masters. Painted the first historical art in America. His art helped transform the Neoclassical art world. Historical painter for Britain’s King George III. Helped found the Royal Academy of Art in London. His “American School” in London ...

Even before Congress declared war on Japan the day after Pearl Harbor, the implications for people of Japanese ancestry living in the United States had begun. On December 7, several hundred first-generation Japanese immigrants were arrested. In the months that followed, the scope of suspicion would expand. By the time the war ended, the period of internment of Japanese immigrants and citizens, lasting from 1941-1945, was considered one of the most unfortunate episodes of American history.

Award-winning western historian Andrew R. Graybill now sheds light on the overlooked interracial Native-white relationships critical in the development of the trans-Mississippi West in this multigenerational saga. Beginning in 1844 with the marriage of Montana fur trader Malcolm Clarke and his Piegan Blackfeet bride, Coth-co-co-na, Graybill traces the family from the mid-nineteenth century, when such mixed marriages proliferated, to the first half of the twentieth, when Clarke ’s children and grandchildren often encountered virulent prejudice.

In August 1860, would anyone have conceived that the upcoming November presidential election would result in the unraveling of a nation and a war between its parts, a war that would claim more lives than all the nation's other wars combined? Told through the lens of West Point classmates and graduates, THE PARTING is a factual narrative of the impulsive descent of the United States of America from peace to war from August 1860 through the First Battle of Bull Run, July 1861.

Lew Sherry and Pete Lang accept an offer they simply can't resist. Oliver Wilton is willing to pay the cowboys $1,000 a day for ten days to protect him from danger that has him living in a state of terror. A seafaring man has arrived at the inn in town and has made no secret of the fact that he's come to settle a score with Wilton.

An epic struggle over land, water, and power is erupting in the American West and the halls of Washington, DC. It began when a 4,000-square-mile area of Arizona desert called Black Mesa was divided between the Hopi and Navajo tribes. To the outside world, it was a land struggle between two fractious Indian tribes; to political insiders and energy corporations, it was a divide-and-conquer play for the 21 billion tons of coal beneath Black Mesa. Today, that coal powers cheap electricity for Los Angeles, a new water aqueduct into Phoenix, and the neon dazzle of Las Vegas.

Do you want to learn about the Declaration of Independence but don’t have the time or patience to read a thick book? Then this is the short and concise book for you! Some of the interesting topics covered in the book are: Meeting of the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia in 1774 and how the delegates from the colonies dealt with the Coercive Acts forced upon the American colonists by the British. The impact of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” on the cry for independence of the American colonies from Great Britain. The resolution introduced by the Virginia delegate Richard Henry...

The creation of the Texas Rangers, as a response to Indian retaliations and renegade assaults on the banking and transportation systems, was born of a need to react quickly. Special skills were required, and unlike the military, resourcefulness and improvisatory thinking were prized, alongside obedience to orders. Author Mike Cox described the ideal Texas Ranger as one who is "able to handle any situation without definite instruction from his commanding officer."