Early America

It should come as no surprise to anyone that it is much easier to overthrow a government than form a new one, and that in turn it is easier to form a government than to govern. The men who founded America knew these facts in theory, but in the last decade of the 18th century, they learned them by experience when, just a few years after the new Constitution had been ratified, a rebellion arose over taxes.

The Berlin blockade brought former allies to the brink of war. Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union defeated and began their occupation of Germany in 1945, and within a few years, the Soviets and their Western partners were jockeying for control of their former foe. Attempting to thwart the Allied powers' plans to create a unified West German government, the Soviets blocked rail and road access to the western sectors of Berlin in June 1948.

Flat Stanley goes north! Stanley Lambchop and his family are in British Columbia, Canada, for some skiing and winter fun. But when Stanley and his new friend Nick go snowboarding - with Stanley as the snowboard, of course - they take a midair tumble just as the wind picks up...and find themselves floating in an amazing Canadian cross-country journey that might just be Stanley's wildest adventure yet!

“Reconstruction” is employed as a generic term for the period that followed the American Civil War. Suggesting a successful rejuvenation of a war-ravaged South, it lamentably gave way to a resurrection of the same white ruling class and slave-owner mentality, protecting the status quo in the legislatures and courts. With the distortion of Reconstruction’s intent came a body of racial policy and a tacitly understood social code that barred the pre-war slave class from personal freedom and opportunity, at the risk of great personal violence for anyone who objected.

The history of the United States is, to a large extent, a history of armed conflict. The nation was first forged in war, a tough fight for independence against one of the world’s largest empires, and that fight would resume less than a generation later with the War of 1812. Then, there were constant low-level conflicts with Native Americans as the nation expanded westwards, and occasionally, the country engaged in full-scale war against the Sioux, Comanche, and Apache.

The Jim Crow South has been notorious for miscarriages of justice for decades, and cases like the Scottsboro Boys continue to be commemorated for the manner in which institutionalized racism ensured the wrongful convictions of minorities. The attention given to these cases raised nearly every potential issue implicating criminal procedure among the states. While the Bill of Rights had ensured a number of rights for criminal defendants, the states had previously been allowed to interpret those rights, leading to instances where defendants weren't provided adequate legal representation.

Debates over paper money and banking are older than the United States of America itself. Eighteenth and 19th century Americans were deeply ambivalent about paper money and central banks, and political fights over these issues were among the bitterest in American history. In fact, controversies over the country’s central bank birthed both the first (1792-1824) and second (1828-1852) party systems. Frequently, policymakers crafted responses to the crisis at hand, and as a result, they implemented policies that were inadequate to the challenges the country faced in the future.

In the 1920s, the burgeoning movie industry was starting to come into its own, and virtually no actor was as famous - or infamous - as John Barrymore. Like many other film stars his age, Barrymore’s career had started in other forms of entertainment, in his case theater. By the time movies were becoming popular, Barrymore was one of the world’s foremost Shakespearean actors.

In Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic, historian Peter C. Mancall reveals how Europeans and Native Americans thought about a natural world undergoing rapid change in the century following the historic voyages of Christopher Columbus. Through innovative use of oral history and folklore maintained for centuries by Native Americans as well as original use of manuscript atlases, paintings that depict European representations of nature, and texts that circulated across the ocean, he reveals how the encounter between the old world and the new changed the fate of millions.

An Independent Empire shows how foreign policy and diplomacy constitute a truly national story, necessary for understanding the history of the United States. In this lively and well-written book, episodes in American history - such as the writing and ratification of the Constitution, Henry Clay's advocacy of an American System, Pinckney's Treaty with Spain, and the visionary but absurd Congress of Panama - are recast as elemental aspects of United States foreign and security policy.

The revolutionary Ohio Valley is often depicted as a chaotic Hobbesian dystopia, in which Indians and colonists slaughtered each other at every turn. In Unsettling the West, Rob Harper overturns this familiar story. Rather than flailing in a morass, the peoples of the revolutionary Ohio Valley actively and persistently sought to establish a new political order that would affirm their land claims, protect them against attack, and promote trade.

Join this great voyage through the history of the Panama Canal, which is, one hundred years after its completion, on the eve of a new chapter in its spectacular history. From the early explorers, many seeking a critical water connection between two of the world's great oceans to the determination of the best engineers of America, the BIG DIG finally opened for shipping - you can be on board! What stood in the way of making this canal a reality?

After the guns of Manassas fell silent, the opposing armies grappled for position wondering what would come next. Popular history has us believe that daily briefings reported something along the lines of “All quiet along the Potomac.” Reality was altogether different. In fact, the fall and early winter of 1861 was a hotbed of activity that culminated in the December combat at Dranesville. The Union victory—sorely needed after the string of defeats at Bull Run, Wilson’s Creek, and Ball’s Bluff—was small when measured against what was to come; it also helped shape the bloody years to follow.

In A Constitutional Culture, Adrian Chastain Weimer uncovers the story of how more than a hundred years before the American Revolution, colonists pledged their lives and livelihoods to the defense of local political institutions against arbitrary rule.

Roots Matter A Baptist’s Interpretation of Church history Learn: The consequences of right and wrong thinking concerning church history What we believe about the beginning and development of church history dramatically influences how we behave as Christians. It also impacts the testimony we have to the world around us. The worldwide influence of the Apostles With the supernatural enabling of the Lord these twelve turned more than the Middle East upside down for Christ. It is very possible that, by the end of the first century, much of the known world at the time, including Africa, India, ...

Special delivery: Danger! When Stanley's mother needs the secret ingredient for a special recipe, Stanley mails himself to Mexico to track down its mysterious maker. But when a band of spies threatens to steal the secret, Stanley's simple trip becomes a race against an opponent that even a flat boy like himself can't slip past!!

In The Sum of Our Dreams, Louis P. Masur offers a sweeping yet compact history of America from its beginnings to the current moment. Evoking Barack Obama's belief that America remains the "sum of its dreams", Masur locates the origin of those dreams - of freedom, equality, and opportunity - and traces their progress chronologically, illuminating the nation's struggle over time to articulate and fulfill their promise.

When Samuel de Champlain founded the colony of Quebec in 1608, he established elaborate gardens where he sowed French seeds he had brought with him and experimented with indigenous plants that he found in nearby fields and forests. In A Not-So-New World, Christopher Parsons observes how it was that French colonists began to learn about Native environments and claimed a mandate to cultivate vegetation that did not differ all that much from that which they had left behind.

Brian Phillips Murphy follows the collaborations between political leaders and a group of unelected political entrepreneurs, including Robert R. Livingston and Alexander Hamilton, who persuaded legislative powers to grant monopolies corporate status in order to finance and manage civic institutions.

Throughout his presidency at the beginning of the 19th century, Thomas Jefferson had worried about the future of the western US, seeing that settlements in the Ohio Valley and lower South relied upon the Mississippi River. France’s controls over the region, in his estimation, put the US at a severe disadvantage.