(It was the heyday of Boss Tweed in New York.) But the Brooklyn Bridge was at once the greatest engineering triumph of the age, a surpassing work of art, a proud American icon, and a story like no other in our history. Courage, chicanery, unprecedented ingenuity and plain blundering, heroes, rascals, all the best and worst in human nature played a part. At the center of the drama were the stricken chief engineer, Washington Roebling and his remarkable wife, Emily Warren Roebling, neither of whom ever gave up in the face of one heartbreaking setback after another. The Great Bridge is a sweeping narrative of a stupendous American achievement that rose up out of its era like a cathedral, a symbol of affirmation then and still in our time.

    From John Adams's opening diatribe to the signing of the document, 1776 is a classic musical play of mounting tension and triumph. Stone and Edwards have dramatically brought to life the legendary delegates: the ever-urbane Benjamin Franklin, the hot-blooded newlywed Thomas Jefferson, and the fiery Adams in conflict with the conservative John Dickinson. With stirring dialogue and colorful, evocative lyrics, 1776 lends an emotion and human dimension to the story that is unattainable in a history book alone.

    The Klondike stampede was a wild interlude in the epic story of western development, and here are its dramatic tales of hardship, heroism, and villainy. We meet Soapy Smith, dictator of Skagway; Swiftwater Bill Gates, who bathed in champagne; Silent Sam Bonnifield, who lost and won back a hotel in a poker game; and Roddy Connors, who danced away a fortune at a dollar a dance. We meet dance-hall queens, paupers turned millionaires, missionaries and entrepreneurs, and legendary Mounties such as Sam Steele, the Lion of the Yukon.Pierre Berton's riveting account reveals to us the spectacle of the Chilkoot Pass, and the terrors of lesser-known trails through the swamps of British Columbia, across the glaciers of souther Alaska, and up the icy streams of the Mackenzie Mountains. It contrasts the lawless frontier life on the American side of the border to the relative safety of Dawson City. Winner of the Governor General's award for non-fiction, Klondike is authentic history and grand entertainment, and a must-read for anyone interested in the Canadian frontier.

    With a clarity and insight unrivaled by any author before it or since, Frances FitzGerald illustrates how America utterly and tragically misinterpreted the realities of Vietnam.

    Kennedy crafted an image that inspired and thrilled millions—and left an outsize legacy after his tragic murder. Only a select inner circle was privy to the man behind Camelot.In Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers, two members of Kennedy’s “Irish Mafia,” give an unflinching, honest, and intimate portrayal of the Kennedy family and JFK’s presidency. As they recount Kennedy’s journey from his charismatic first campaign for Congress to his rapid rise to national standing, culminating on a November day in Texas, O’Donnell and Powers reveal the inner workings of a leader still mourned today.

    The letters vividly recreate a period of American history unparalleled for its drama and poignancy. From reviews of the first edition: No story in America's history has been so often told, or has so well stood the retelling, as that of the Old South and its destruction. But Robert Manson Myers's splendid [book] tells it as it has not been told before, in the fullness of its poignancy and tragedy. -Madison Jones, New York Times Book Review A great and indispensable book. -Jonathan Yardley, New Republic A Gone with the Wind saga...This book is superb. -Clarence E. Olson, St. Louis Post Dispatch The Children of Pride is family reconstruction on a grand scale. It demonstrates how the editing of sources can become, in the hands of an imaginative scholar, the work of creative history. -Citation for the 1973 National Book Award in History. The original version of The Children of Pride was the winner of the 1973 National Book Award in History.It was also named among the best books of 1972 by the American Library Association and by the New York Times Book Review, Saturday Review, Time, Washington Post, and Newsweek.

    Used by Kevin Costner as a resource text for the motion picture Dances with Wolves, this is an extraordinarily in-depth examination of the day-to-day lives of the North American plains Indians, with over one thousand illustrations and thirty-two four-color plates. Covering everything from social customs, personal qualities, and government to types of weaponry, achievement marks, and the training of Indian boys, The Mystic Warriors of the Plains is a comprehensive encyclopedia of Plains Indian lore that will delight and inform everyone interested in understanding the native peoples of the Plains. "Magnificently and accurately ... conveys both the tragic ironies and splendors of the rich plains civilization." —Newsweek "Fascinating detail that gives a better idea of the plains people than mere description can do...."—Navajo Times

    labor history to a wide audience. Strike! narrates the exciting hidden history of the U.S. labor movement from the point of view of the rank-and-file workers who lived it. "An exciting history of American labor....Brings to life the flashpoints of labor history....Scholarly, genuinely stirring."--The New York Times

    This classic work, winner of the 1973 National Book Award in Philosophy and Religion and Christian Century’s choice as the Religious Book of the Decade (1979), is now issued with a new chapter by noted religious historian David Hall, who carries the story of American religious history forward to the present day.

    P. Franklin.In The Negro in the Making of America, eminent historian Benjamin Quarles provides one of the most comprehensive and readable accounts ever gathered in one volume of the role that African Americans have played in shaping the destiny of America. Starting with the arrival of the slave ships in the early 1600s and moving through the Colonial period, the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and into the last half of the twentieth century, Quarles chronicles the sweep of events that have brought blacks and their struggle for social and economic equality to the forefront of American life. Through compelling portraits of central political, historical, and artistic figures such as Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, Duke Ellington, Malcolm X, and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Quarles illuminates the African American contributions that have enriched the cultural heritage of America. This classic history also covers black participation in politics, the rise of a black business class, and the forms of discrimination experienced by blacks in housing, employment, and the media. Quarles's groundbreaking work not only surveys the role of black Americans as they engaged in the dual, simultaneous processes of assimilating into and transforming the culture of their country, but also, in a portrait of the white response to blacks, holds a mirror up to the deeper moral complexion of our nation's history. The restoration of this history holds a redemptive quality—one that can be used, in the author's words, as a "vehicle for present enlightenment, guidance, and enrichment."

     Beginning in what is now Kansas City he joined a caravan headed for Bent’s Fort in southeastern Colorado near the Spanish Peaks, which was known to the Native Americans as Wah-to-Yah. Just before Garrard had arrived in the southwest Charles Bent, who was the recently appointed Governor of the newly acquired New Mexico Territory, was scalped and killed by Pueblo warriors during the Taos Revolt. Garrard’s account is therefore a vivid first-hand account of the Taos Revolt and its aftermath. Through the course of Wah-to-yah and the Taos Trail Garrard explains how he came into contact with some of the most famous figures of western history, including Kit Carson, Jim Beckwourth, Ceran St. Vrain, George F. Ruxton, William Bent, and others. Scholars like Robert Gale have highlighted how the book provides “anthropologically accurate” descriptions of the Cheyenne Indians and other Native American tribes in the southwest of America. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the old west, for as the Pulitzer Prize winning author A. B. Guthrie Jr. stated, it is “the genuine article” and brilliantly depicts “the Indian, the trader, the mountain man, their dress, and behavior and speech and the country and climate they lived in.” Lewis Hector Garrard was the son of a prominent family from Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1846 he set out for a ten-month trip to the southwestern United States. While in Taos, Garrard attended the trial of some of the Mexicans and Pueblos who had revolted against U.S. rule of New Mexico, newly captured in the Mexican-American War. Garrard wrote the only eye witness account of the trial and hanging of six convicted men. His book Wah-to-Yah was first published in 1850 and he passed away in 1887.

    Stricken by cancer as his family faced financial ruin, Ulysses S. Grant wrote his Personal Memoirs to secure their future, and in doing so won for himself a unique place in American letters. Acclaimed by readers as diverse as Mark Twain, Matthew Arnold, Gertrude Stein, and Edmund Wilson, the Personal Memoirs demonstrates the intelligence, intense determination, and laconic modesty that made Grant the Union’s foremost commander. This Library of America volume also includes 174 letters written by Grant from 1839 to 1865. Many of them are to his wife, Julia, and offer an intimate view of their affectionate and enduring marriage; others, addressed to fellow generals, government officials, and his congressional patron Elihu B. Washburne, provide a fascinating contemporary perspective on the events that would later figure in the Memoirs.Grant’s autobiography is devoted almost entirely to his life as a soldier: his years at West Point, his service in the peacetime army, and his education in war during conflicts foreign and domestic. Grant considered the Mexican War “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation” and thought that the Civil War was our punishment for it; but his retrospective disapproval did not prevent him from becoming enchanted by Mexico or from learning about his own capacity for leadership amid the confusion and carnage of battle.His account of the Civil War combines a lucid treatment of its political causes and its military actions, along with the story of his own growing strength as a commander. At the end of an inconsequential advance in Missouri in 1861 he realized that his opponent “had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him.” Fort Donelson and Shiloh taught him to seize the initiative, while his success in living off the land during the Vicksburg campaign inspired William T. Sherman to undertake his marches through the interior of the South.By 1864 Grant knew that the rebellion could be suppressed only by maintaining relentless pressure against its armies and methodically destroying its resources. As the Union’s final general-in-chief, he acted with the resolve that had eluded his predecessors, directing battles whose drawn-out ferocity had no precedent in Western warfare. His narrative of the war’s final year culminates in his meeting with Lee at Appomattox, a scene of quiet pride, sadness, and humanity.Grant’s writing is spare, telling, and quick, superbly evocative of the imperatives of decision, motion, and action that govern those who try to shape the course of war. Grant wrote about the most destructive war in American history with a clarity and directness unequaled in our literature.

    In this entertaining volume, Ramon F. Adams, author of the popular Western Words, tell the story of the old cowboy cooks, and the result is another highly original contribution to the folklore of the cattle country.Although the cowboy cleared the Southwestern frontier of savage Indians and opened the land for settlement, the cook and his commissary contributed greatly to the success of the operation; for as an army depends upon its mess-kitchens, so the cowboys depended upon the chuck wagon. Without it, there would have been to trail drives to rescue Texas from bankruptcy following the Civil War, no roundups to speed the development of the cattle industry, and no beef for the heavily populated areas of the United States.The author records the place and influence of the range cook upon Western life. He discusses the functions of “coosie,” the food he served, and his methods of preparing it-giving recipes for sourdough biscuits, fluff-duffs, son-of-a-bitch stew, and other distinctive dishes of the range. He describes, too, “the wagon,” its evolution, and its place in the hearts of the men who called it home.Although there remain a few chuck wagons on the larger ranches today, they have become so scarce that one is rarely seen except in a museum or a rodeo parade, and the younger generation of cooks, like the cowboys themselves has been tamed.Every cook was a “character,” perhaps with reason, for no man ever worked under greater difficulties or with fewer conveniences. Anecdotes and incidents which illuminate the idiosyncrasies of these “Sultans of the Skillets” are recounted with gusto.Nick Eggenhofer’s drawings help Mr. Adams bring the cook and his accoutrement vividly to life.

    Kate Stone was twenty when the war began, living with her widowed mother, five brothers, and younger sister at Brokenburn, their plantation home in northeastern Louisiana. When Grant moved against Vicksburg, the family fled before the invading armies, eventually found refuge in Texas, and finally returned to a devastated home.Kate began her journal in May, 1861, and made regular entries up to November, 1865. She included briefer sketches in 1867 and 1868. In chronicling her everyday activities, Kate reveals much about a way of life that is no more: books read, plantation management and crops, maintaining slaves in the antebellum period, the attitude and conduct of slaves during the war, the fate of refugees, and civilian morale. Without pretense and with almost photographic clarity, she portrays the South during its darkest hours.

    Thirty years after its publication, Ferol Egan's now classic tale continues to enlighten and engage readers.

    This is the story of the American Depression between 1929 and 1939.

    In the later years of the depression, members of the Georgia Writers' Project visited and interviewed blacks, many of whose grandparents, smuggled into slavery as late as 1858, had passed on the customs and beliefs of their African past. Seeking evidence of African traditions, the project's workers questioned the blacks about conjure--the curses and potions responsible for turns of luck, illnesses, and even death--about dreams that often determine the course of daily life, and about spirits and other apparitions as real as walking, breathing people.

    Lavishly illustrated, with hundreds of photos, paintings, drawings, maps, original illustrations, and rare archival images. The story is amplified by memorable quotations from native people.

    Saponise Cuch, Chief of the White River Utes, said to Robert Emmitt in 1948, "I am an old man now, and I am the only one left who remembers this. I have known that someone would come to tell this story; now you will write it out, as I have told it to you." Drawing upon historical documents, transcripts, and letters as well as interviews with Northern Ute elders, Emmitt describes the tragedy of United States Indian Agent Nathan Meeker's plan to "civilize" the Utes, and the resulting military intervention in which fifty Ute warriors held off the U.S. cavalry and killed Meeker, Major Thomas Thornburgh, and others. Ute warriors sought only to defend their families and their way of life, but the price for that defense was forced removal from Colorado and the loss of over twelve million acres. "The Utes Must Go" became a rallying cry for white settlers who coveted the lands of peaceful Utes.Written with the care and precision of a finely crafted novel, The Last War Trail was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1954. Long out of print and now brought back with new rare photographs and illustrations, The Last War Trail will be eagerly read by anyone trying to understand conflicts of the nineteenth century between Native American and encroaching settlers.

    . . the product of decades of study by a layman archeologist-historian. With a rich blend of archeology, anthropology, Indian oral traditions (he gives us one of the best accounts of the Walum Olum, the fascinating hieroglyphics depicting the tribal origins of the Delaware), and documentary research, Weslager writes for the general reader as well as the scholar."--American Historical Review In the seventeenth century white explorers and settlers encountered a tribe of Indians calling themselves Lenni Lenape along the Delaware River and its tributaries in New Jersey, Delaware, eastern Pennsylvania, and southeastern New York. Today communities of their descendants, known as Delawares, are found in Oklahoma, Kansas, Wisconsin, and Ontario, and individuals of Delaware ancestry are mingled with the white populations in many other states. The Delaware Indians is the first comprehensive account of what happened to the main body of the Delaware Nation over the past three centuries. C. A. Weslager puts into perspective the important events in United States history in which the Delawares participated and he adds new information about the Delawares. He bridges the gap between history and ethnology by analyzing the reasons why the Delawares were repeatedly victimized by the white man.

    In the words of Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., it is "an important contribution to social history to which students will constantly turn."

    Lash picks up where Eleanor and Franklin ended, tracing Mrs. Roosevelt’s 17 years of life after FDR’s death in 1945. Combining meticulous research with riveting anecdote, he examines the humanitarian work that earned Eleanor the title of First Lady of the World.

    171 Days: A Fragment of AutobiographyBattleCounterattack Inside the Third ReichInterrogation Germany from a boxcarOflag 350 milesLager HammelburgDeceptive freedomA walking tour of Bavaria in the SpringtimeIn the U.S. Army againPsrt 2. A quarter century later: reflection & explorationConscience & history The mystic chords of memory Five patriots The instrumental meaning of warThe expressive meaning of war The quest of a kingdomAn Informal Glossary

    

    Experiences of a correspondent of the New York Tribune within the Confederate lines in 1861, and later with the Union Armies and in southern prisons

    To Americans he is usually portrayed as "bad King George," that oppressive tyrant named in the Declaration of Independence as "unfit to be the ruler of a free people."Was George bad or mad? Author John Brooke avoids the hearsay of history because of his access to all the King's papers which were never used in their entirety by previous biographers. In addition, Brooke inherited the complete papers of Sir Lewis Namier, whose researches into this period are unquestionably the most valuable of our century. Tracing George's life through notebooks, diaries, and accounts, Brooke provides a very personal biography of George III, rather than a history of his reign.Was George bad? George founded the Royal Academy, was a patron of the great astronomer Herschel, and paid out of his own pocket for every book now in the King's Library of the British Museum. He was one of Britain's most devoted and best-informed rulers, fond of country life and his family.Was George mad? Not insane at all, George was grievously afflicted with porphyria--a painful illness caused by a rare metabolic imbalance. His doctors did not understand his malady and their treatment was arbitrary, irrelevant, and cruel. It was enough to reduce any victim to fury and despair and insured that the last years of the King's life were miserable and largely empty.The early death of his father made George his grandfather's unexpected heir, and when he came to the throe in 1760 at twenty-two, younger than any monarch since Edward VI, nothing in his education had prepared him for his new responsibilities. Brooke shows the torment this brought him, inexperienced and naïve, "trapped between Pitt who coveted power for a purpose and Bute who oscillated between the wish for power and the fear of responsibility, with Newcastle flitting between them. . . ." Somewhat of a rarity among English rulers, George had a long and happy marriage marred at the end by the queen's imposed separation from him to protect her form his alleged madness.Of all that has been written about George, Brooke's King George III is the first to show him as a human being with likes and dislikes, penchants and perversities and to dispel the ludicrous caricature that has made up the myth.George III was the last king of England who ruled as well as reigned. Because he was a very personal monarch whose own decisions and conduct affected public policy as no British monarch's have since, this biography provides us with new light on the causes and conduct of the American Revolution.

    

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    However, when rumors spread that the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory were rich in gold, miners and newspapers wanted to organize prospecting parties. At first the government discouraged attempts to trespass upon the Sioux land, but under the pressure of public opinion, the Army in 1874 sent the Seventh Cavalry Regiment, commanded by General George A. Custer, to explore the Hills. With reports that gold had indeed been found by Custer, all hope of preserving the Sioux treaty vanished. Miners flocked to the area despite attempts by the government to keep them out; by 1876, the Black Hills had been officially removed from Sioux control.The story of the expedition and its effect on relations with the Sioux is told from government documents, including much new material from the National Archives, and from newspaper correspondents' reports and previously unpublished journals. William Illingworth's original photographs of the expedition, reproduced here, were almost as influential as reports of the expedition in luring prospectors to the Black Hills.

    society, this account follows the rise and decline of the antimilitarist tradition—rooted in fear of dictatorship—that has been an important part of the American heritage from colonial times until the 1950s and even today. In addition to providing a documented historical survey of notable issues and landmarks that have affected the role of the civilian and the military until the mid-1950s, the volume also offers ample background for an understanding of the complicated problem of militarism in the last century, including principles and dynamics that are relevant in the 21st century. Bringing to light new materials and making use of archives and papers that ground the analysis in actual events, this compelling examination will excite controversy among pacifists, militarists, and anyone interested in history, U.S. military policy, and trends in current events.

    

    Republican" was of course Robert Alphonso Taft of Ohio, political conservative, party regular, United States Senator from 1939 until his death in 1953, and unsuccessful aspirant for the GOP presidential nomination in 1940, 1948, and 1952. This biography is the only book on Taft based on full access to the Senator's papers. Sympathetic, yet frequently critical, James T. Patterson offers a thoughtful and interpretive study of the personal and political life of a man who not only wielded great influence in his time but whose bold views on the issues have assumed increasing relevance in the 1960s'a and 1970s's.Taft was born in Cincinnati, on September 8, 1889, the son of William Howard Taft, President and Chief Justice of the United States, and the grandson of Alphonso Taft, a judge, Secretary of War, Attorney General, and Minister to Austria-Hungary and Russia. Always aware of his heritage, he compiled a brilliant record at his uncle's Taft School, at Yale, and at the Harvard Law School. He then practiced law in Cincinnati for four years, worked under Herbert Hoover for the United States Food Administration in Washington and the American Relief Administration in Paris, and served several terms in the Ohio house and senate between 1921 and 1933. In 1938 he won the first of three terms to the United States Senate.Taft affirmed individual freedom, equality of opportunity, and the rule of law. He fought hard against the spread of federal bureaucracy, high government spending, and Big Labor. But he was also flexible, and he pained Republican conservatives by battling for public housing and federal aid for education. His capacity for work and his quick and retentive mind established him as the congressional leader in many successful struggles against the proposals of Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman. In 1953 he rose above disappointment to serve loyally as President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Senate leader.Although Taft was gentle and tender with family and close friends, he was often self-conscious and combative in the glare of public life, and many contemporaries found him cold and colorless. Because he refused to endorse government's wide-ranging foreign policies, he was also labeled - carelessly - as a mindless isolationist. For all these reasons he failed to achieve a presidential nomination. From the perspective of the 1970s', many of his views, especially on foreign policy, seem relevant and attractive.

    To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

    Comprehensive survey of the constitution and the times mentioned n the title.