American Western History

A gripping work of reportage that, for the first time, tells the story of "Chucky" Taylor, a young American who lost his soul in Liberia, the country where his African father was a ruthless warlord and dictator.

The Old West has had a powerful impact on the concept of gentlemanly masculinity among Americans. For those traditionalists among you, this audiobook is filled with authentic designs, facts, weapons, and tales from the mid-1800s to the turn of the century and slightly beyond. Here are some of the roots of the most popular holsters, fashions, weapons, cartridges, and myths preferred by collectors, reenactors, and cowboy action enthusiasts.

The gun, like the axe and the plow, was an essential tool in the exploration and settlement of the trans-Mississippi West. It provided food for the cooking pot as well as protection against two- or four-legged marauders. Of course the employment of the gun, whether for good or evil, depended upon the user. The men and women who lived the 19th-century western experience sometimes described in detail the role firearms played in their lives.

The birth of the United States of America signaled a deadly struggle that cost the lives of thousands of American and British soldiers. The conflict between the mother country, Britain, and the colonists didn't start overnight; it was series of events over a decade that finally led to the first shots being fired at the battle of Lexington and Concord. This bitter war would drag on for years, with battlegrounds scattered up and down the eastern seaboard of the now United States - few were spared the effects of the war.

Rodeo is a dangerous and painful performance in which only the strongest and most skilled riders succeed. In the popular imagination, the western rodeo hero is often a stoic white man who embodies the toughness and independence of America’s frontier past. However, marginalized people have starred in rodeos since the very beginning. Cast out of popular western mythology and pushed to the fringes in everyday life, these cowboys and cowgirls found belonging and meaning at the rodeo, staking a claim to national inclusion.

If you do not know why the United States evolved into the greatest nation in the history of man — you need to read this book. If you do not even know that the United States is the greatest nation in the history of man — you need to read this book. Too many people study history as a series of events — boring. Why these events occurred is necessary to an understanding of American history — you need to read this book. American Exceptionalism stares people in the face, yet they cannot see it! It sets us apart from all others on Earth. If we lose this exceptionalism, not only are we ...

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 ...

Our American West, Volume 2 begins with America’s first colonizers, the prairie dogs, and how out on the ranges they were so hated by ranchers that they were almost made extinct. Conestoga Wagons were once called “prairie schooners” crossing America long before the famed Pony Express. The indomitable courage of Sarah Winnemucca, the “Prairie Princess” rivals that of a tall Swede named Showshoe Thompson who skied the snowy river passes of the Sierra Nevadas.

Bass Reeves was a man who forged his own destiny and wrote his own life story as he went along. Born into slavery, Reeves rose above all challenges to become one of the most legendary lawmen of the American West. As a deputy US marshal, he held himself to a personal code of conduct that went beyond the badge he wore. For Bass, the line between right and wrong was clear, and he never hesitated to enforce the law—even when it meant pursuing his own friends or family. Justice wasn’t just his duty; it was his calling.

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.

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.

From the Trail of Tears to Wounded Knee and Little Bighorn, the narrative of American history is incomplete without the inclusion of the Native Americans that lived on the continent before European settlers arrived in the 16th and 17th centuries. Since the first contact between natives and settlers, tribes like the Sioux, Cherokee, and Navajo have both fascinated and perplexed outsiders with their history, language, and culture.

Deployed to posts from the Missouri River to the Pacific in 1848, the United States Army undertook an old mission on frontiers new to the United States: occupying the Western territories; suppressing American Indian resistance; keeping the peace among feuding Indians, Hispanics, and Anglos; and consolidating United States sovereignty in the region.

From the 1830s onward, a succession of well-born Britons headed west to the great American wilderness to find adventure and fulfillment. They brought their dogs, sporting guns, valets, and all the attitudes and prejudices of their class. Prairie Fever explores why the West had such a strong romantic appeal for them at a time when their inherited wealth and passion for sport had no American equivalent.

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.

The history of African Americans has been complicated and controversial. While some will fight against racism, others deny the severity of it throughout the ages. Whether or not the issue is as serious as it used to be is a separate topic for debate. You will learn more about slavery, the rise of the cotton market in the Southern states, the abolitionism of slavery, segregation, and individuals like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X who have made a significant impact on the common perspective on these issues. Many things have changed over the past two centuries. Let’s find out what.

The policy of manifest destiny increased tensions with Mexico in the 1840s. Mexico's northern half formed the western border of the territory bought in the Louisiana Purchase. Naturally, notions of the United States expanding to the Pacific Ocean alarmed Mexico, which held what is today the west coast of the United States. However, Mexico first came to regard American expansion as a serious problem with the immigration of Americans into its northeastern territory.

If you want to learn about the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic but don’t have the time or patience to read a thick book, then this is the short and concise book for you!! The book “The 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic in America: A Short History” covers many aspects of the flu pandemic, including: The virus is believed to have originated in Kansas, from there it spread rapidly throughout the armies on both sides of World War I. The state of medicine in the early twentieth century was such that it was of little help to the unlucky many that fell ill with the virus. Researchers in America and Europe...

To describe such a movement and its effects. Professor Turner has the advantage to be a descendant of New Yorkers, of New England stock, but native to the west, and living alongside the most complete collection of materials upon the west which has ever been brought together—the Library of the Wisconsin State Historical Society. The aim of the volume is not to show the Rise of the New West as though it were a separate story, but to show how the nation found itself in the midst of questions involving the west.

This is a concise history, intended for travellers, but of inestimable value to anyone looking for an overview of the Caribbean and its mainland coastal states, with a focus on the past few centuries. The history of the Caribbean does not make much sense without factoring in the cities - Pensacola, New Orleans, Galveston - and the ambitions of the states on its continental shores, notably the United States. This account is grounded in a look at the currents and channels of the sea, and its constraints, followed by the history of 'pre-contact' civilisations.