Best of
American-History

1955

This Hallowed Ground: The Story of the Union Side of the Civil War


Bruce Catton - 1955
    Through his brilliant and stirring narrative, Bruce Catton conveys the human aspect of history and translates meticulously researched historical fact into an absorbing chronicle of the war. This Hallowed Ground deals with the entire scope of the Civil War from the months of unrest and hysteria that led to Fort Sumter to the days of tragedy and hope that followed Appomattox. Along with the author, readers will relive the shock and shell and glory of the war. The true greatness of this book, however, lies in Catton's deeply moving analysis of the issues, and his search for the true meaning of the conflict.

The Strange Career of Jim Crow


C. Vann Woodward - 1955
    Vann Woodward, who died in 1999 at the age of 91, was America's most eminent Southern historian, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Mary Chestnut's Civil War and a Bancroft Prize for The Origins of the New South. Now, to honor his long and truly distinguished career, Oxford is pleased to publish this special commemorative edition of Woodward's most influential work, The Strange Career of Jim Crow.The Strange Career of Jim Crow is one of the great works of Southern history. Indeed, the book actually helped shape that history. Published in 1955, a year after the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education ordered schools desegregated, Strange Career was cited so often to counter arguments for segregation that Martin Luther King, Jr. called it "the historical Bible of the civil rights movement." The book offers a clear and illuminating analysis of the history of Jim Crow laws, presenting evidence that segregation in the South dated only to the 1890s. Woodward convincingly shows that, even under slavery, the two races had not been divided as they were under the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s. In fact, during Reconstruction, there was considerable economic and political mixing of the races. The segregating of the races was a relative newcomer to the region.Hailed as one of the top 100 nonfiction works of the twentieth century, The Strange Career of Jim Crow has sold almost a million copies and remains, in the words of David Herbert Donald, "a landmark in the history of American race relations."

We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher


E.C. "Teddy Blue" Abbott - 1955
    C. Abbott was a cowboy in the great days of the 1870's and 1880's. He came up the trail to Montana from Texas with the long-horned herds which were to stock the northern ranges; he punched cows in Montana when there wasn't a fence in the territory; and he married a daughter of Granville Stuart, the famous early-day stockman and Montana pioneer. For more than fifty years he was known to cowmen from Texas to Alberta as "Teddy Blue." This is his story, as told to Helena Huntington Smith, who says that the book is "all Teddy Blue. My part was to keep out of the way and not mess it up by being literary.... Because the cowboy flourished in the middle of the Victorian age, which is certainly a funny paradox, no realistic picture of him was ever drawn in his own day. Here is a self-portrait by a cowboy which is full and honest." And Teddy Blue himself says, "Other old-timers have told all about stampedes and swimming rivers and what a terrible time we had, but they never put in any of the fun, and fun was at least half of it." So here it is—the cowboy classic, with the "terrible" times and the "fun" which have entertained readers everywhere. First published in 1939, We Pointed Them North has been brought back into print by the University of Oklahoma Press in completely new format, with drawings by Nick Eggenhofer, and with the full, original text.

The Day Lincoln Was Shot


Jim Bishop - 1955
    Parallels of the activities of the President with those of his assassin in an unforgettable, suspense- filled chronicle. 320 pages.

Columbus


Ingri d'Aulaire - 1955
    A life of the Genoese weaver's son who sought to prove the world is round, telling how he studied map-making in Portugal, waited long years for financial and material support from Isabella of Spain, and finally made four voyages to the New World.

The Last Wilderness


Murray Morgan - 1955
    First published in 1955, this book tells the lively and entertaining story of the Olympic Peninsula, "the fist of land thrust north between Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean, a wilderness area of six thousand square miles, as large as the state of Massachusetts, more rugged than the Rockies, its lowlands blanketed by a cool jungle of fir and pine and cedar, its peaks bearing hundreds of miles of living ice that gave rise to swift rivers alive with giant salmon; the first land in the Pacific Northwest to be reported by explorers, the last to be mapped--the last wilderness." Murray Morgan has recorded the epic adventures of the pioneers of this remote region in this rousing and humor-filled saga, one that should capture the imagination of Americans everywhere.

When the Century Was Young


Dee Brown - 1955
    Now, with a natural storyteller's flair, he offers a fascinating look at both this century and his own colorful life as an important American writer.

Land They Fought For


Clifford Dowdey - 1955
    

The American Story


Garet Garrett - 1955
    He was a champion of business who believed in profiting the old fashioned way. He was a libertarian who deplored the rise of big government. He was a constitutionalist who was aghast at how presidents and congresses shredded the document in times of economic crisis and war. He was the last of the great old-time liberals who opposed FDR's welfare-warfare state. Above all else, he was a brilliant student of the American experience who could tell a story like no one else of his generation. Garet Garrett's last book was his own retelling of American history, with a special focus on the technologies and people behind them that transformed life for average people, along with a relentless and truth-telling story about the rise of the state. These had been a theme of all of his work, from his novels of the 1920s to his case against the New Deal in the 1930s. His final work tells the story of the American people as its never been told, from an early experiment in freedom, and the fight against the powers in Washington that sought to suppress that freedom, all the way through the beginnings of a preventable Cold War. The images that the author presses on the mind in The American Story--a complete biography of a country--are vivid and telling, the product of a lifetime of study and the wisdom of age.

Decline of the American Republic


John T. Flynn - 1955
    

A Child's First Book of American History


Earl Schenck Miers - 1955
    Here are the explorers, the Indians, the settlers and fur trappers, the soldiers, the statesmen, the men and women who have shaped our country and its destiny. It is a continuous take of adventure, of wars, of industry and invention, of hardship and growth; it is an unparalleled tale of courage, high ideals, hard work--and a precious thing called Freedom.Perhaps more happened, faster, in the history of this country than in any other. Earl Schenck Miers tells its story as it should be told: in terms of the great moments and events, and through the lives and experiences of individuals.Among the fifty chapters included are: the faith and longing for freedom of worship that brought the band of Pilgrims to Plymouth's shores; James Smith's own account of his capture by the Indians in 1755; excerpts from Davy Crockett's diary, telling of the last days of the Alamo massacre; a young Southern girl's description of the burning of Columbia, S.C., in the Civil War. Miers has recreated unforgettably, the hardships of a cattle drive, the inspiring story of how Booker T. Washington overcame great obstacles to build a school, the suspense that held America in a spell in 1927 when a young man named Lindbergh flew to Paris by himself.This telling of the American story is dramatic, ever engrossing--and it is based on careful scholarship. The more than 200 illustrations by James Daugherty--most of them in color--are an integral part of the book. A great artist and a superb scholar-storyteller have joined forces to produce a memorable record--an instructive, immensely readable and heart-warming book about the country we love.

Tales of Old-Time Texas


J. Frank Dobie - 1955
    Frank Dobie is known as the Southwest's master storyteller. With his eye for color and detail, his ear for the rhythm of language and song, and his heart open to the simple truth of folk wisdom and ways, he movingly and unpretentiously spins the tales of our collective heritages. This he does in Tales of Old-Time Texas, a heartwarming array of twenty-eight stories filled with vivid characters, exciting historical episodes, and traditional themes. As Dobie himself says: "Any tale belongs to whoever can best tell it." Here, then, is a collection of the best Texas tales—by the Texan who can best tell them.Dobie's recollections include such classics in Lone Star State lore as the tale of Jim Bowie's knife, the legend of the Texas bluebonnet, the story of the Wild Woman of the Navidad, and the account of the headless horseman of the mustangs. Other stories in this outstanding collection regale us with odd and interesting characters and events: the stranger of Sabine Pass, the Apache secret of the Guadalupes, the planter who gambled away his bride, and the Robinhooding of Sam Bass. These stories, and many more, make Tales of Old-Time Texas a beloved classic certain to endure for generations.

The Columbus Story


Alice Dalgliesh - 1955
    

The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, Volume III: The Lowering Clouds, 1939 - 1941


Harold L. Ickes - 1955
    

Three Presidents and Their Books: The Reading of Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt


Arthur Eugene Bestor - 1955
    D. Roosevelt. All three were known to have been bookmen, though in varying degrees and in different fashion. The authors were well-suited to the task. Arthur E. Bestor, Jr., at the time professor of history at the University of Illinois, had established his reputation as an authority on American communitarian experiments; ahead of him was his recognition as one of the eminent constitutional scholars of his generation. David C. Mearns, as the time, could look back on a 35-year career at the Library of Congress. When the papers of Robert Todd Lincoln were unsealed in 1947, he was entrusted with bringing them to publication. Jonathan Daniels, in addition to a long career as newspaperman, first met Franklin Roosevelt as a youth, and served in a number of capacities in the Roosevelt administration. All three papers were presented as the fifth set of Windsor Lectures in Librarianship at the University of Illinois in 1953, but their interest far transcends library science.

Pictorial History of American Presidents


John Durant - 1955
    Hardcover and dust jacket, as pictured; dust jacket has edge wear; text is mildly aged (am)

Prudence Crandall


Elizabeth Yates - 1955
    In 1855, Crandall opened a school for African-American women in Connecticut, creating a firestorm. Accused of defying God, Crandall is subjected to imprisonment. But she wouldn't yield her belief that we are all equal in the eyes of God.

History of Maury County, Tennessee


William Bruce Turner - 1955
    History of Maury County, Tennessee by historian, William Bruce Turner.