Starting in 1821 with just a handful of men, the Rangers' first purpose was to keep settlers safe from the feared and gruesome Karankawa Indians, a cannibalistic tribe that wandered the Texas territory. As the influx of settlers grew, the attacks increased and it became clear that a much larger, better trained force was necessary. From their tumultuous beginning to their decades of fighting outlaws, Comanche, Mexican soldados and banditos, as well as Union soldiers, the Texas Rangers became one of the fiercest law enforcement groups in America.  In a land as spread-out and sparsely populated as the west itself, the Rangers had unique law-enforcement responsibilities and challenges. The story of the Texas Rangers is as controversial as it is heroic. Often accused of vigilante-style racism and murder, they enforced the law with a heavy hand. But above all they were perhaps the defining force for the stabilization and the creation of Texas. From Stephen Austin in the early days through the Civil War, the first eighty years of the Texas Rangers is nothing less then phenomenal, and the efforts put forth in those days set the foundation for the Texas Rangers that keep Texas safe today.

    He was smart, well-spoken, attractive to both white and Mexican women, a good dancer, and a man with a nose for money, horses, and trouble. His spree of crimes and murders has been immortalized in dime westerns, novels, and movies. But the whole story of his short, epically violent life has never been told as it has been here. “The Kid’s story has been told many times. But not like this” (The New York Times Book Review). In his incredible novel, Ron Hansen showcases his masterful research and inimitable style as he breathes life into history, bringing readers back into the late 1800s and into Billy’s boyhood as a ranch hand just trying to wrest a fortune from an unforgiving landscape. We are with Billy in every gunfight and horse theft and get to know him in full before his grand death in a hail of bullets in 1881 at the age of twenty-one. Original, powerful, and swiftly told, The Kid is an “entertaining and lively…an excellent, transportive read” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

    Anderson. 1996, Deseret Book.

    . . should have strong, immediate interest for the ecologists engaged in efforts to restore the Everglades."--William B. Robertson, research biologist for Everglades National ParkFrom the book--Pa built our house out of rough lumber that they got from Frazier’s sawmill . . . a one-room house about 16 to 18 feet long and 12 feet wide. We all slept on cots and sat on boxes or a trunk. The kitchen was in the corner, and Ma cooked on a four-hole stove, which cost six dollars. Me and my middle brother, Alvin, sat on a trunk to eat at the table. That trunk had some long cracks in it. My brother knew just how to move so the crack would pinch . . . .Years before the Park was established, when all the land and marsh seemed to belong to me, we would help ourselves to whatever we could see or trade for survival. Mostly we would sell gator and otter hides. . . . On this particular trip, after grunting awhile at the gator hole, I gave up and made tracks to the camp since I wanted to return by dark. . . . I was lying under my skeeter bar with a small tarp stretched between two cabbage palms. About midnight, I heard the dried cabbage fronds breaking in the path toward my camp. The night was pitch black . . .Few people today can claim a living memory of Florida's frontier Everglades. Glen Simmons, who has hunted alligators, camped on hammock-covered islands, and poled his skiff through the mangrove swamps of the glades since the 1920s, is one who can. Together with Laura Ogden, he tells the story of backcountry life in the southern Everglades from his youth until the establishment of the Everglades National Park in 1947. During the economic bust of the late ‘20s, when many natives turned to the land to survive, Simmons began accompanying older local men into Everglades backcountry, the inhospitable prairie of soft muck and mosquitoes, of outlaws and moonshiners, that rings the southern part of the state. As Simmons recalls life in this community with humor and nostalgia, he also documents the forgotten lifestyles of south Florida gladesmen. By necessity, they understood the natural features of the Everglades ecosystem. They observed the seasonal fluctuations of wildlife, fire, and water levels. Their knowledge of the mostly unmapped labyrinth of grassy water enabled them to serve as guides for visiting naturalists and scientists. Simmons reconstructs this world, providing not only fascinating stories of individual personalities, places, and events, but an account that is accurate, both scientifically and historically, of one of the least known and longest surviving portions of the American frontier.Glen Simmons has lived in the south Florida Everglades since his birth in 1916 in Homestead. In 1995 he was awarded a State of Florida Heritage Award for his unique contribution to Florida's history and folk culture. He has demonstrated and taught glades skiff building for the Florida Department of State, Bureau of Folklife, and the South Florida Historical Society; his boats are on permanent display at the Florida Folklife Museum in White Springs, Florida, and at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida, Miami.Laura Ogden, also born in Homestead and a life-long friend of Glen Simmons, is assistant professor of anthropology at Florida International University.

    Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering. Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew.

    It follows the wild horse from its evolutionary origins on this continent to its return with the conquistadors to its bloody battles on the old frontier to its present plight as it fights for survival on the vanishing range.Along the way, you meet some of the great characters -- equine and human alike -- in American history, including Comanche, the gallant horse that survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn; Charlie Joe, the intrepid cast member of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show; Fritz, the mustang that became America’s first equine movie star; and Bugz, the survivor of the 1998 wild horse massacre outside Reno, Nevada. There’s also Wild Horse Annie, who lobbied for the first federal protections for mustangs and, after a twenty-year fight, saw them signed into law in 1971. In the tradition of Barry Lopez and Peter Matthiessen, Mustang follows the horse tracks across American history and shows that despite ever-encroaching civilization and dwindling protections, the horses still run wild, with spirit unbroken -- a living tableau of our heritage. But for how much longer, no one can say.

    It reads like the written version of a modern film documentary, with newly translated 500-year-old "sound bites" stitched together by the author-narrator in such a way as to create a seamless and compelling story. In these two volumes you will find neither a defense of the conquistadors nor a politically correct polemic against them. The author has made every effort to avoid moralizing on these events, but simply to recount them, with minimal commentary, using the best sources available. Moral judgments are left to the reader. Volume I opens with the four voyages of Christopher Columbus, offering new insights into this man's complex character. It then explores in lavish detail (some of which is supplied by the Aztecs) the conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés. In Volume II the reader is taken into the high Andes with the brazen Pizarro brothers, into the wilds of the Texas and Mexican desert with Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, and along a trail of successive misfortunes with the expedition of Hernando de Soto--through today's Florida, Georgia, South and North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas. Conquistador Voices is a one-stop layman's summary of this epic period, delving into persons and events we still talk about today. Order a copy for yourself or other history reader now. Maps, index, informational footnotes, and a brief bibliography are found in each volume.

    But street addresses were not invented to help you find your way; they were created to find you. In many parts of the world, your address can reveal your race and class.In this wide-ranging and remarkable book, Deirdre Mask looks at the fate of streets named after Martin Luther King Jr., the wayfinding means of ancient Romans, and how Nazis haunt the streets of modern Germany. The flipside of having an address is not having one, and we also see what that means for millions of people today, including those who live in the slums of Kolkata and on the streets of London. Filled with fascinating people and histories, The Address Book illuminates the complex and sometimes hidden stories behind street names and their power to name, to hide, to decide who counts, who doesn’t―and why.

    Powerful pharaohs built great cities on the fertile banks of the Nile, and employed thousands of labourers to create lavish tombs and temples such as Thebes and the pyramids of the Giza plateau. The exceptional beauty and scale of ancient Egypt s antiquities still draws millions of visitors to Egypt s museums and monuments each year. The Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt is a celebration of these wonders, from Tutankhamun s tomb to Cleopatra s obelisks, from ancient papyrus scrolls covered with hieroglyphs to golden amulets in the form of ankhs and scarabs. The book also uncovers ancient Egyptian life from the role of women and the form of an Egyptian wedding banquet, to the weights, measures and currencies used in everyday trading and explores the modern archaelogy taking place on the ancient sites revealing the Egyptians artefacts and tools. With a combination of modern, specially commissioned colour illustrations and images of Egyptian antiquities and treasures alongside a detailed history of the civilisation to put it all into context, the world of the pharaohs is brought to life in vivid detail. For intrigued adults or fascinated children alike, The Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt provides a wealth of information about the riches of the ancient world."

    His passing on March 6, 1900, would have been unremarkable if a city health officer hadn’t noticed a swollen black lymph node on his groin—a sign of bubonic plague. Empowered by racist pseudoscience, officials rushed to quarantine Chinatown while doctors examined Wong’s tissue for telltale bacteria. If the devastating disease was not contained, San Francisco would become the American epicenter of an outbreak that had already claimed ten million lives worldwide.To local press, railroad barons, and elected officials, such a possibility was inconceivable—or inconvenient. As they mounted a cover-up to obscure the threat, ending the career of one of the most brilliant scientists in the nation in the process, it fell to federal health officer Rupert Blue to save a city that refused to be rescued. Spearheading a relentless crusade for sanitation, Blue and his men patrolled the squalid streets of fast-growing San Francisco, examined gory black buboes, and dissected diseased rats that put the fate of the entire country at risk.In the tradition of Erik Larson and Steven Johnson, Randall spins a spellbinding account of Blue’s race to understand the disease and contain its spread—the only hope of saving San Francisco, and the nation, from a gruesome fate.

    Haunted by the landscape of his youth, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners are posted to remote regions crisscrossed by drug routes and smuggling corridors, where they learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive.Cantú tries not to think where the stories go from there. Plagued by nightmares, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when an immigrant friend travels to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantú discovers that the border has migrated with him, and now he must know the whole story. Searing and unforgettable, The Line Becomes a River makes urgent and personal the violence our border wreaks on both sides of the line.

    . . and he's hit the jackpot! After the success of his first two books, Duh! and They Did What!?, Fenster has struck again with Well, Duh! Our Stupid World, and Welcome to It. More tales of the dim-witted and simpleminded are incorporated in chapters such as: Food for Thoughtlessness: The All-Turnip Diet and Other Loony Meals at the Mindless Cafe Hollyweird: Bird Brains in Tinsel Town Dumb Ways to Die: Buried Alive but Not for Long Government by the Idiots: How to Get Elected to AnythingCombined sales of Bob Fenster's previous two books total over 50,000 copies.Ted Rueter is a self-described political junkie and a professor of political science at Tulane University in New Orleans. He is the author of eight books and has written for the New York Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has taught at Middlebury College, Georgetown University, Smith College, and UCLA. He is the founder of Noise Free America (Noisefree.org). His Web site is DrPolitics.com.Bob Fenster has combed the world of the intellectually challenged searching for more tales of stupidity to entertain us with . . . and he's hit the jackpot! After the success of his first two books, Duh! and They Did What!?, Fenster has struck again with Well, Duh! Our Stupid World, and Welcome to It. More tales of the dim-witted and simpleminded are incorporated in chapters such as: Food for Thoughtlessness: The All-Turnip Diet and Other Loony Meals at the Mindless Cafe Hollyweird: Bird Brains in Tinsel Town Dumb Ways to Die: Buried Alive but Not for Long Government by the Idiots: How to Get Elected to AnythingCombined sales of Bob Fenster's previous two books total over 50,000 copies.

    Some fear it is dangerous and addictive, while others feel it should be decriminalized. Whatever the viewpoint, cannabis incites debate at every level, and the effect it has on every corner of the globe is undeniable.In this comprehensive study, Martin Booth crafts a tale of medical advance and religious enlightenment; of political subterfuge and law enforcement; of cunning smugglers, street pushers, gang warfare, writers, artists, and musicians. And above all, Booth chronicles the fascinating process through which cannabis became outlawed throughout the Western world, and the effect such legislation has had on the global economy.

    She was stabbed 29 times as she hiked to Havasu Falls on the Havasupai Indian Reservation at the bottom of Grand Canyon. Her killer was a distressed 18-year-old Havasupai youth. Pure Land is the story of this tragedy. But it is also the story of how McGivney’s quest to understand Hanamure’s life and death wound up guiding the author through her own life-threatening crisis. On this journey stretching from the southern tip of Japan to the bottom of Grand Canyon, and into the ugliest aspects of human behavior, Pure Land offers proof of the healing power of nature and the resiliency of the human spirit."There is such tragic irony here. The very things that Japanese tourist Tomomi Hanamure is so deeply passionate about--the wild, stark, beautiful American West and Native American culture--are what leads to her violent death. Around this single horrific event Annette McGivney has masterfully woven three separate, highly personal narratives."-- S. C. Gwynne, Author of Empire of the Summer Moon, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize"McGivney intuitively grounds her narrative while exploring humanity's roots of culture and origins of character, like the light of the sun awakening each intricate layer of earth in the deepest of canyons. She is a storyteller of the highest caliber, with a style reminiscent of Jon Krakauer's journalistic skill and unmistakable purpose."-- Carine McCandless, author of The Wild Truth, the New York Times bestselling follow-up to Into the Wild"Annette McGivney has gathered three disparate narratives and braided them into a bewitching tapestry of darkness and light, pain and atonement, along with the unexpected gifts that can sometimes accompany profoundly devastating loss." -- Kevin Fedarko, author of The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon

    In the depths of the Great Depression it became a symbol of American resilience and ingenuity in the face of crisis, putting thousands of men to work in a remote desert canyon and bringing unruly nature to heel. Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Michael Hiltzik uses the saga of the dam’s conception, design, and construction to tell the broader story of America’s efforts to come to grips with titanic social, economic, and natural forces. For embodied in the dam’s striking machine-age form is the fundamental transformation the Depression wrought in the nation’s very culture—the shift from the concept of rugged individualism rooted in the frontier days of the nineteenth century to the principle of shared enterprise and communal support that would build the America we know today. In the process, the unprecedented effort to corral the raging Colorado River evolved from a regional construction project launched by a Republican president into the New Deal’s outstanding—and enduring—symbol of national pride. Yet the story of Hoover Dam has a darker side. Its construction was a gargantuan engineering feat achieved at great human cost, its progress marred by the abuse of a desperate labor force. The water and power it made available spurred the development of such great western metropolises as Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, and San Diego, but the vision of unlimited growth held dear by its designers and builders is fast turning into a mirage. In Hiltzik’s hands, the players in this epic historical tale spring vividly to life: President Theodore Roosevelt, who conceived the project; William Mulholland, Southern California’s great builder of water works, who urged the dam upon a reluctant Congress; Herbert Hoover, who gave the dam his name though he initially opposed its construction; Frank Crowe, the dam’s renowned master builder, who pushed his men mercilessly to raise the beautiful concrete rampart in an inhospitable desert gorge. Finally there is Franklin Roosevelt, who presided over the ultimate completion of the project and claimed the credit for it. Hiltzik combines exhaustive research, trenchant observation, and unforgettable storytelling to shed new light on a major turning point of twentieth-century history.