From the ancient, warm sea that covered most of the state, through Native American history and the history of the town named after a great chief, "The Legend of the Petoskey Stone" is a welcome addition to the fables so richly told and illustrated by this much-loved and honored children's book team.Author Kathy-jo Wargin has earned national acclaim through award-winning children's classics such as Michigan's official state book, "The Legend of Sleeping Bear," Children's Choice Award winner "The Legend of the Loon, The Edmund Fitzgerald: Song of the Bell," and many others. Kathy-jo enjoys writing about nature and its effect on all our lives, and is a frequent guest speaker throughout the country. She is also a faculty member of the Bear River Writers Workshop, sponsored by the University of Michigan. She lives in Petoskey, Michigan.Since the publication of "The Legend of Sleeping Bear," artist Gijsbert van Frankenhuyzen has been an established presence in the world of children's book illustration. His many other titles with Sleeping Bear Press include "The Edmund Fitzgerald: Song of the Bell, Adopted by an Owl, Jam & Jelly by Holly & Nellie," and "The Legend of Leelanau." Gijsbert and his family live in Bath, Michigan.

    By the acclaimed author of the Academy Award-winning movie Schindler's List, this Civil War saga is both a riveting account of America at war and a tapestry of human drama.

    The beliefs of Founders such as Patrick Henry, John Quincy Adams, John Jay, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Mason, and many others are clearly presented. America's Godly Heritage also provides excerpts from court cases showing that for 160 years under the Constitution, Christian principles were officially and legally inseparable from American public life. This book is an excellent primer for those who want to know more about what was intended for America by the Founders and what can be done to return America to its original guiding philosophy. It's ideal to share with home gatherings, church groups, and Sunday school classes, or to use as a history supplement for children or schools.

    Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, and the other explorers and soldiers that took part in these expeditions dedicated their lives to seeking political and religious glory, helping to build an empire unlike any the world had ever seen.Centuries later, two dominant narratives about these conquests have prevailed--one of the romance and exoticism of adventure, the other of cruelty and exploitation of innocent people at the service of politics and religious bigotry. In The Conquistadors, Mexican historian Fernando Cervantes--himself a descendent of one of the conquistadors--tells the complete story of the conquests while steering a middle course between these two viewpoints. He argues that, while the conquistadors had undeniable faults, the tendency to condemn them tells us more about our modern sense of shame than it does about their original intentions.Drawing upon previously untapped primary sources that include diaries, letters, chronicles, and polemical treatises, Cervantes reframes the story of the Spanish conquest of the New World, examining the late medieval world from which the conquistadors emerged. At the heart of the story are the conquistadors themselves, whose epic ambitions and moral contradictions defined an era, as well as their supporters and detractors. Cervantes helps us understand them on their own terms and shows us how their achievements still have much to tell us in our increasingly post-nationalist world.

    Boorstin’s prophetic vision of an America inundated by its own illusions has become an essential resource for any reader who wants to distinguish the manifold deceptions of our culture from its few enduring truths.Cover design by Matt Dorfman.

    But only in the beginning. After the opening act of the great national drama, Native Americans yielded to the westward rush of European settlers.Or so the story usually goes. Yet, for three centuries after Columbus, Native people controlled most of eastern North America and profoundly shaped its destiny. In Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel K. Richter keeps Native people center-stage throughout the story of the origins of the United States.Viewed from Indian country, the sixteenth century was an era in which Native people discovered Europeans and struggled to make sense of a new world. Well into the seventeenth century, the most profound challenges to Indian life came less from the arrival of a relative handful of European colonists than from the biological, economic, and environmental forces the newcomers unleashed. Drawing upon their own traditions, Indian communities reinvented themselves and carved out a place in a world dominated by transatlantic European empires. In 1776, however, when some of Britain's colonists rebelled against that imperial world, they overturned the system that had made Euro-American and Native coexistence possible. Eastern North America only ceased to be an Indian country because the revolutionaries denied the continent's first peoples a place in the nation they were creating.In rediscovering early America as Indian country, Richter employs the historian's craft to challenge cherished assumptions about times and places we thought we knew well, revealing Native American experiences at the core of the nation's birth and identity.

    That same year, Hiram Revels and Joseph Hayne Rainey became the first African-American U.S. senator and congressman respectively. In South Carolina, only twenty years after the death of arch-secessionist John C. Calhoun, a black man, Jasper J. Wright, took a seat on the state's Supreme Court. Not even the most optimistic abolitionists had thought such milestones would occur in their lifetimes. The brief years of Reconstruction marked the United States' most progressive moment prior to the civil rights movement.Previous histories of Reconstruction have focused on Washington politics. But in this sweeping, prodigiously researched narrative, Douglas Egerton brings a much bigger, even more dramatic story into view, exploring state and local politics and tracing the struggles of some fifteen hundred African-American officeholders, in both the North and South, who fought entrenched white resistance. Tragically, their movement was met by ruthless violence-not just riotous mobs, but also targeted assassination. With stark evidence, Egerton shows that Reconstruction, often cast as a “failure” or a doomed experiment, was rolled back by murderous force. The Wars of Reconstruction is a major and provocative contribution to American history.

    To the tough-minded and self-reliant farmers, the monopolistic, land-grabbing railroad represented everything they despised: consolidation, organization, conformity. But Norris idealizes no one in this epic depiction of the volatile situation, for the farmers themselves ruthlessly exploited the land, and in their hunger for larger holdings they resorted to the same tactics used by the railroad: subversion, coercion and outright violence. In his introduction, Kevin Starr discusses Norris's debt to Zola for the novel's extraordinary sweep, scale and abundance of characters and details.

    President Abraham Lincoln and one of the most quoted speeches in United States history. It was delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, during the American Civil War, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated the Confederates at the decisive Battle of Gettysburg.

    Arguing that it was one of the most important of the postwar twentieth-century decades, despite its reputation as an eminently forgettable period, Schulman reconstructs public events and private lives, high culture and low, analyzing not only presidential politics and national policy but also the broader social and cultural experiences that transformed American life. Here are the names, faces, and movements that gave birth to the world we now live in-from Nixon and Carter to The Godfather and the Ramones; from Billie Jean King and Phyllis Schlafly to NOW and the ERA; from the Energy Crisis to Roe v. Wade. The Seventies is an astutely provocative reexamination of a misunderstood era.

    McCarthyism was on the run, and movements on the political left were grabbing headlines. The media lampooned John Birchers's accusations that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist puppet. Mainstream America snickered at warnings by California Congressman James B. Utt that barefooted Africans were training in Georgia to help the United Nations take over the country. Yet, in Utt's home district of Orange County, thousands of middle-class suburbanites proceeded to organize a powerful conservative movement that would land Ronald Reagan in the White House and redefine the spectrum of acceptable politics into the next century.Suburban Warriors introduces us to these people: women hosting coffee klatches for Barry Goldwater in their tract houses; members of anticommunist reading groups organizing against sex education; pro-life Democrats gradually drawn into conservative circles; and new arrivals finding work in defense companies and a sense of community in Orange County's mushrooming evangelical churches. We learn what motivated them and how they interpreted their political activity. Lisa McGirr shows that their movement was not one of marginal people suffering from status anxiety, but rather one formed by successful entrepreneurial types with modern lifestyles and bright futures. She describes how these suburban pioneers created new political and social philosophies anchored in a fusion of Christian fundamentalism, xenophobic nationalism, and western libertarianism.While introducing these rank-and-file activists, McGirr chronicles Orange County's rise from nut country to political vanguard. Through this history, she traces the evolution of the New Right from a virulent anticommunist, anti-establishment fringe to a broad national movement nourished by evangelical Protestantism. Her original contribution to the social history of politics broadens--and often upsets--our understanding of the deep and tenacious roots of popular conservatism in America.

    The dedicated mother-son team of Marilyn and Reid Yalom visited hundreds of cemeteries to create The American Resting Place, following a coast-to-coast trajectory that mirrors the vast historical pattern of American migration. Yalom’s incisive, often poignant exploration of gravestone inscriptions reveal changing ideas about death and personal identity, and demonstrate how class and gender play out in stone. Rich particulars include the story of one seventeenth-century Bostonian who amassed a thousand pairs of gloves in his funeral-going lifetime, the unique burial rites and funerary symbols found in today’s Native American cultures, and a “lost” Czech community brought uncannily to life in Chicago’s Bohemian National Columbarium.From fascinating past to startling future--DVDs embedded in tombstones, "green" burials, and “the new aesthetic of death”--The American Resting Place is the definitive history of the American cemetery.

    Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas," through the growth of strife and conflict in the 1960s to the major issues of the 1990s. harvard Sitkoff offers not only a brilliant interpretation of the personalities and dynamics of the civils-rights organization--SNCC, CORE, NAACP, SCLC, and others--but a superb study of the continuing problems plaguing the African-American population: the future that in 1980 seemed to hold much promise for a better way of life has by the early1990s hardly lived up to expectations. Jim Crow has gone, but, forty years after "Brown," poverty, big-city slums, white backlash, politically and socially conservativepolicies, and prolonged recession have made economic progress for the vast majority of blacks an elusive, perhaps ever more distant goal. All Americans who strove and suffered to make democracy real come vividly to life in these compelling pages.

    From the assembly lines of Henry Ford to the open roads of Route 66, from the lore of Jack Kerouac to the sex appeal of the Hot Rod, America’s history is a vehicular history—an idea brought brilliantly to life in this major work by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Paul Ingrassia. Ingrassia offers a wondrous epic in fifteen automobiles, including the Corvette, the Beetle, and the Chevy Corvair, as well as the personalities and tales behind them: Robert McNamara’s unlikely role in Lee Iacocca’s Mustang, John Z. DeLorean’s Pontiac GTO , Henry Ford’s Model T, as well as Honda’s Accord, the BMW 3 Series, and the Jeep, among others. Through these cars and these characters, Ingrassia shows how the car has expressed the particularly American tension between the lure of freedom and the obligations of utility. He also takes us through the rise of American manufacturing, the suburbanization of the country, the birth of the hippie and the yuppie, the emancipation of women, and many more fateful episodes and eras, including the car’s unintended consequences: trial lawyers, energy crises, and urban sprawl. Narrative history of the highest caliber, Engines of Change is an entirely edifying new way to look at the American story.

    It is Nine Nations. Each has its capital and its distinctive web of power and influence. Some are still close to being raw frontiers; others have four centuries of history. Each has a peculiar economy; each commands an emotional allegiance from its citizens. Some are made topographically distinct by mountains, deserts, rivers. Others are defined by attitudes, ways of making a living, music, and language. Few are contained by lines that now describe "Canada," "Mexico," "the United States." Each of these Nine Nations has its own desires. Most important, each nation has a distinct prism through which it views the rest of the world.