Book picks similar to
Mochi's War: The Tragedy of Sand Creek by Chris Enss


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Freedom (America, #2)


Mike Bond - 2021
    Daisy starts her PhD in brain research, and Tara battles heroin as her rock band reaches stardom.Troy is soon caught up in mind-numbing combat in Vietnam, while Mick returns to the States to lead the antiwar effort. Tara’s band signs a Motown contract amid the Detroit riots. At Stanford, Daisy expands her study of the human brain under LSD and other mind-altering drugs. Troy falls in love with a Vietnamese teacher and is slowly losing faith in the War.Freedom ends the night before the Tet uprising in Vietnam that will change the War, and trap Troy and his beloved in the fires of hell.

Navajo Code Talkers


Nathan Aaseng - 1992
    The messages were totally unintelligible to everyone except a small select group within the Marine Corps: the Navajo code talkers-a group of Navajos communicating in a code based on the Navajo language. This code, the first unbreakable one in U.S. history, was a key reason that the Allies were able to win in the Pacific.Navajo Code Talkers tells the story of the special group, who proved themselves to be among the bravest, most valuable, and most loyal of American soldiers during World War II.

Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America


Michael A. McDonnell - 2015
    McDonnell reveals the pivotal role played by the native peoples of the Great Lakes in the history of North America. Though less well known than the Iroquois or Sioux, the Anishinaabeg, who lived across Lakes Michigan and Huron, were equally influential. Masters of Empire charts the story of one group, the Odawa, who settled at the straits between those two lakes, a hub for trade and diplomacy throughout the vast country west of Montreal known as the pays d’en haut.Highlighting the long-standing rivalries and relationships among the great Indian nations of North America, McDonnell shows how Europeans often played only a minor role in this history, and reminds us that it was native peoples who possessed intricate and far-reaching networks of commerce and kinship, of which the French and British knew little. As empire encroached upon their domain, the Anishinaabeg were often the ones doing the exploiting. By dictating terms at trading posts and frontier forts, they played a crucial part in the making of early America.Through vivid depictions—all from a native perspective—of early skirmishes, the French and Indian War, and the American Revolution, Masters of Empire overturns our assumptions about colonial America. By calling attention to the Great Lakes as a crucible of culture and conflict, McDonnell reimagines the landscape of American history.

The Story of American Freedom


Eric Foner - 1977
    Eric Foner takes freedom not as a timeless truth but as a value whose meaning and scope have been contested throughout American history. His sweeping narrative shows freedom to have been shaped not only in congressional debates and political treatises but also on plantations and picket lines, in parlors and bedrooms, by our acknowledged leaders and by former slaves, union organizers, freedom riders, and women's rights activists.

The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek: A Tragic Clash Between White and Native America


Richard Kluger - 2011
    There, thanks to moderate climate, sheltering mountain ranges, lush forests, crystal-pure waterways teeming with wildlife, and the absence of predatory neighbors, the local tribes had prospered in their remote paradise for some 10,000 years.All that suddenly ended in the middle of the nineteenth century when a proud, retired young U.S. Army major, an engineer with high political ambitions, was appointed the first governor of newly acquired, 100,000-square-mile Washington Territory. Isaac Ingalls Stevens’s primary task was to persuade the natives that their only hope for survival was to sign treaties handing over their ancestral lands to the American government in exchange for protection from oncoming whites eager to turn the wilderness into crop-land. But one tribal chief at Puget Sound, Leschi of the Nisqually nation, insisted that his people be dealt with fairly and not coerced into surrendering virtually their entire sacred homeland without just compensation. The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek is the emblematic story of this confrontation between the headstrong American governor and the defiant leader of the Nisquallies and their brethren who resisted him and, in doing so, stirred up the gross abuse of power and the licensing of injustice on our last frontier.Here is Richard Kluger’s poignant rendering of the tragic relationship between the red and white races, told in graphic detail. Our social literature abounds with accounts of how racist degradation was visited on the far more numerous black and Hispanic Americans. Yet the nation’s self-righteous, methodical dispossession of the Indians has been largely dismissed by whites as the sad but inevitable price of social and technological progress. Through the experience of a single tribe, The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek seeks to clarify the historical record. It also tells, in a hopeful epilogue, the latest chapter of the Nisqually tribe’s struggle to endure amid the mounting pressures of twenty-first-century modernity.

Brothers and Warriors


Geoff Baggett - 2016
    Oppression, privation, and fear overwhelm the villages and homesteads of North and South Carolina. The Patriot cause seems all but lost. James and John Hamilton are violently drawn into the war by forces seemingly beyond their control. Since their early childhood these brothers have survived rejection, hunger, death, tragedy and loss. But will they survive the bloody onslaught and depravity of the Redcoats and their Tory allies? Can they spill the blood of their enemies and still hold on to compassion and humanity? Will they ever again know the peace of their humble cabin in the Carolina forest? Brothers and Warriors is the tumultuous, triumphant story of brothers fighting and surviving for home, justice, love, and freedom … and for one another.

Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West


Ethan Rarick - 2008
    After months of grueling travel, the 81 men, women and children would be trapped for a brutal winter with little food and only primitive shelter. The conclusion is known: by spring of the next year, the Donner Party was synonymous with the most harrowing extremes of human survival. But until now, the full story of what happened, what it tells us about human nature and about America's westward expansion, remained shrouded in myth.Drawing on fresh archaeological evidence, recent research on topics ranging from survival rates to snowfall totals, and heartbreaking letters and diaries made public by descendants a century-and-a-half after the tragedy, Ethan Rarick offers an intimate portrait of the Donner party and their unimaginable ordeal: a mother who must divide her family, a little girl who shines with courage, a devoted wife who refuses to abandon her husband, a man who risks his life merely to keep his word. But Rarick resists both the gruesomely sensationalist accounts of the Donner party as well as later attempts to turn the survivors into archetypal pioneer heroes. The Donner Party, Rarick writes, is a story of hard decisions that were neither heroic nor villainous. Often, the emigrants displayed a more realistic and typically human mixture of generosity and selfishness, an alloy born of necessity.A fast-paced, heart-wrenching, clear-eyed narrative history, A Desperate Hope casts new light on one of America's most horrific encounters between the dream of a better life and the harsh realities such dreams so often must confront.

Hidden Warbirds: The Epic Stories of Finding, Recovering, and Rebuilding WWII's Lost Aircraft


Nicholas A. Veronico - 2013
    His website, wreckchasing.com, is the go-to source for enthusiasts who want to know more about how to locate vintage airplane wrecks and then tell their stories.In this engaging new book, Veronico explores the romantic era of World War II Warbirds and the stories of some of its most famous wrecks, including the Dotty Mae (a P-47 submerged for over 60 years in the Traunsee in Austria, excavated and recovered with great care), the Swamp Ghost (a B-17E which crashed in New Guinea in the latter days of World War II and which was only recently discovered), and Glacier Girl (a P-38, part of "The Lost Squadron," which crashed in a large ice sheet in Greenland in 1942). Throughout, Veronico provides a history of the aircraft, as well as the unique story behind each discovery and recovery with ample illustrations. Hidden Warbirds is aviation history at its best.

A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion


Ron Hansen - 2011
    Based on a real case whose lurid details scandalized Americans in 1927 and sold millions of newspapers, acclaimed novelist Ron Hansen’s latest work is a tour de force of erotic tension and looming violence. Trapped in a loveless marriage, Ruth Snyder is a voluptuous, reckless, and altogether irresistible woman who wishes not only to escape her husband but that he die—and the sooner the better. No less miserable in his own tedious marriage is Judd Gray, a dapper corset-and-brassiere salesman who travels the Northeast peddling his wares. He meets Ruth in a Manhattan diner, and soon they are conducting a white-hot affair involving hotel rooms, secret letters, clandestine travels, and above all, Ruth’s increasing insistence that Judd kill her husband. Could he do it? Would he? What follows is a thrilling exposition of a murder plan, a police investigation, the lovers’ attempt to escape prosecution, and a final reckoning for both of them that lays bare the horror and sorrow of what they have done. Dazzlingly well-written and artfully constructed, this impossible-to-put-down story marks the return of an American master known for his elegant and vivid novels that cut cleanly to the essence of the human heart, always and at once mysterious and filled with desire.

Benedict Arnold's Navy: The Ragtag Fleet That Lost the Battle of Lake Champlain But Won the American Revolution


James L. Nelson - 2006
    This landmark book shows how Arnold's fearless leadership against staggering odds in a northern wilderness secured for America the independence that he would later try to betray.