History West United States

Published in 2000 to critical acclaim, The American West: A New Interpretive History quickly became the standard in college history courses. Now Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher offer a concise edition of their classic, freshly updated. Lauded for their lively and elegant writing, the authors provide a grand survey of the colorful history of the American West, from the first contacts between Native Americans and Europeans to the beginning of the 21st century.

In 1836, two missionaries and their wives were among the first Americans to cross the Rockies by covered wagon on what would become the Oregon Trail. Dr. Marcus Whitman and Reverend Henry Spalding were headed to present-day Washington state and Idaho, where they aimed to convert members of the Cayuse and Nez Perce tribes. Both would fail spectacularly as missionaries.

Step into the rugged wilderness of the American West with one of history's most iconic figures, Theodore Roosevelt, in his thrilling and insightful book, Good Hunting: In Pursuit of Big Game in the West. This classic work offers listeners a firsthand account of Roosevelt's adventures as a hunter, conservationist, and naturalist, capturing the essence of the wild frontier and the majesty of its big game.

In Losing Eden award-winning historian Sara Dant debunks the myth of the American West as “Eden” and instead embraces a more realistic and complex understanding of a region that has been inhabited and altered by people for tens of thousands of years. In this lively narrative Dant discusses the key events and topics in the environmental history of the American West, from the Beringia migration, Columbian Exchange, and federal territorial acquisition to post–World War II expansion, resource exploitation, and current climate change issues.

Paul Jennings was born into slavery on the plantation of James and Dolley Madison in Virginia, later becoming part of the Madison household staff at the White House. Once finally emancipated by Senator Daniel Webster later in life, he would give an aged and impoverished Dolley Madison, his former owner, money from his own pocket, write the first White House memoir, and see his sons fight with the Union Army in the Civil War.

In the 1850s, the United States was a nation divided. In the North, industrialization and urbanization were both significant drivers of change. In the South, a largely agrarian economy was supported by the institution of slavery. The East and West of the country were also divided, not by social or political differences but by a vast tract of largely untouched, rugged, and often hostile territory. There were just two ways to travel from the East Coast to the Pacific Coast or vice versa.

In the minds of many Americans, the name of Jesse James and the Wild West are practically synonymous. Jesse James was a robber, a murderer, and a notorious outlaw, who carried as many weapons as he could. He could shoot with both hands while he held the reins of his horse in his teeth. He was an extremely popular man in his day, a phenomenon that he readily accepted because he was a person who craved attention.

In 1765, as the Stamp Act riled eastern seaports, frontiersmen clashed with the British Empire over another issue: Indian relations. When British officials launched a diplomatic expedition into the American interior to open trade with the Indian warrior Pontiac, the Black Boys formed to stop it and led an uprising that threatened the future of Britain's empire. Clashing with traders, diplomats, Native warriors, and imperious British officials, the Black Boys evolved into an organized political movement that resisted the Crown years before the Declaration of Independence.

In this gripping narrative nonfiction book, meet the resolute and spirited people who fought for the rights of coal miners, and discover how the West Virginia Mine Wars paved the way for vital worker protections nationwide. More than a century later, this overlooked story of the labor movement remains urgently relevant.

The English had long dreamed of colonizing America, especially after Sir Francis Drake brought home Spanish treasure and dramatic tales from his raids in the Caribbean. Ambitions of finding gold and planting a New World colony seemed within reach when, in 1606, Thomas Smythe extended overseas trade with the launch of the Virginia Company. But from the beginning the American enterprise was a disaster.

John Wesley Powell’s first descent of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1869 counts among the most dramatic chapters in American exploration history. When the Canyon spit out the surviving members of the expedition - starving, battered, and nearly naked - they had accomplished what others thought impossible and finished the exploration of continental America that Lewis and Clark had begun almost 70 years before.

In old age, Charlie Siringo was called "Ulysses of the Wild West" for the long journey he took across the western frontier. Son of the Old West brings him and his legendary world vividly to life.

American Indians remain familiar as icons, yet poorly understood as historical agents. In this ambitious book that ranges across Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and eastern California (a region known as the Great Basin), Ned Blackhawk places Native peoples squarely at the center of a dynamic and complex story as he chronicles two centuries of Indian and imperial history that profoundly shaped the American West.

The "settling" of the American West has been perceived throughout the world as a series of quaint, violent, and romantic adventures. But in fact, Patricia Nelson Limerick argues, the West has a history grounded primarily in economic reality - in hardheaded questions of profit, loss, competition, and consolidation. Here, she interprets the stories and the characters in a new way: The trappers, traders, Indians, farmers, oilmen, cowboys, and sheriffs of the Old West "meant business" in more ways than one, and their descendants mean business today.

From one of the most beloved Western authors comes an epic historical tale of adventure and romance in the great wilderness. Against the epic backdrop of the building of the Union Pacific Railroad across plains and deserts and through the mountains to meet up with the Southern Pacific in Utah comes a sprawling, historical tale. Warren Neale is a brilliant civil engineer who is constantly confronted with construction problems. He is sided by Larry Red King, a Texas gunfighter and friend.

Prairie Gothic is full of Texas lore. Erickson tells the story of people in the context of a specific place. This place, instrumental in shaping their lives, is the flatland prairie of northwestern Texas that has gone by various names (High Plains, South Plains, Staked Plains, and Llano Estacado). One branch of Erickson's family arrived in Texas in 1858. Erickson's family interacts with significant historical figures, such as Cynthia Ann Parker, and includes members of the Estacado Quaker colony.

The British colony of West Florida—which once stretched from the mighty Mississippi to the shallow bends of the Apalachicola and portions of what are now the states of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana—is the forgotten fourteenth colony of America's Revolutionary era. Historian Mike Bunn offers the first comprehensive history of the colony, introducing listeners to the Gulf Coast's remarkable British period and putting West Florida back in its rightful place on the map of Colonial America.

The Caribbean island of Puerto Rico stands at a pivotal crossroads, shaped by over 500 years of political and cultural turbulence. From Spanish colonization in 1493 to its current status as a US territory, Puerto Rico's quest for self-determination and identity remains one of the most complex political narratives in modern history. This book offers a captivating exploration of Puerto Rico’s political evolution, tracing its transformation from a Spanish colony to an unincorporated US territory.

Here is the most detailed and most engagingly narrated history to date of the legendary two-year facedown and shootout in Lincoln. Until now, New Mexico's late-19th-century Lincoln County War has served primarily as the backdrop for a succession of mythical renderings of Billy the Kid in American popular culture.

Did you know the coal fields of West Virginia were the scene of violence and strife between coal miners and coal company management in the early 20th century? The West Virginia Coal Wars are often overlooked in US history. It is time that changed. Several lessons can be learned from what happened during the West Virginia Coal Wars. These confrontations led to developments in labor relations that define collective bargaining to this day. There were heroes and villains, saints and sinners, and a mountain culture that was inexorably changed.