He kept a day-by-day journal of his overland journey. Abbey provides a wealth of information about what it was like to travel overland by wagon in 1850.

    He spoke to his pregnant wife on the telephone before he began his evacuation after the South Tower fell. Sensing something ominous, Pasquale crouched down and huddled into a corner of the stairwell as the 110-story tower came crashing down around him. He survived the tower collapse and woke up in the open air hours later on The Pile, a stack of debris seven stories high. The firemen who rescued Pasquale shared his remarkable story of survival with the media, as did others who cared for him that day. His story became a myth, an urban legend, and an enigma that gave rise to much speculation. Here he tells his story in captivating detail of falling and "surfing' the collapse of the North Tower.Visit www.911surfer.com for more details.

    Army, the last to be deployed before the end of World War Two. Arriving in Europe in late 1944, they were immediately, and with very little battle experience, thrust into battle at St Vith. The Battle of St. Vith was part of the Battle of the Bulge, which began on December 16, 1944, and represented the right flank in the advance of the German 5th Panzer Army, toward the ultimate objective of Antwerp. The inexperienced American troops were faced with adverse weather conditions, difficult terrain and a desperate German opponent fighting for their lives and the quickly-disappearing hope of victory. The defense of St Vith is recognized as one the most important Allied victories of this period, driving the Germans away from their goal of Antwerp and halting the last great German offensive of the war. Compiled from records and first-hand accounts from the officers and soldiers of the 106th Division, Colonel Dupuy’s account of the final days of 1944 is a must-read for WW2 enthusiasts and fans of regimental histories. Colonel R. Ernest Dupuy (1887- 1976) was a soldier, newspaperman and military historian. He worked as a journalist in New York before enlisting in the army. Serving in both wars, he retired in 1947. Continuing his writing career, he specialized in writing military history, and authored or co-authored many books on the U.S. Army, West Point, and military affairs. St Vith: Lion in the Way was first published in 1949.

    Seuss's infectious rhymes, fanciful creatures, and roundabout plots not only changed the way children read but imagined the world. And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat and the Hat, these and other classics have sold hundreds of millions of copies and entertained children and adults for decades.After graduating from Dartmouth, Theodor Geisel used his talents as an ad-man, political provocateur, and social satirist, gradually but irrevocably turning to children's books. Theodor Geisel tells the unlikely story of this remarkable transformation. In this compact and engrossing biography, Donald Pease reveals the evolution of Dr. Seuss's creative persona while offering an honest appraisal of his life. The book also features many of Dr. Seuss's lesser-known illustrations, including college drawings, insecticide ads, and wartime political cartoons--all of which offer a glimpse of his early artistic style and the visual origins of the more famous creatures that later populated his children's books.As Pease traces the full arc of Dr. Seuss's prolific career, he combines close textual readings of many of Dr. Seuss's works with a unique look at their genesis to shed new light on the enduring legacy of America's favorite children's book author.

    The tragedy brought national attention to the unsafe working conditions, long hours, and low pay that had prompted a national garment workers’ strike a year before. Jo Ann Argersinger’s volume examines the context, trajectory, and impact of this Progressive Era event. An introduction explores the demands industrialization placed upon urban working women, their fight to unionize, and the Triangle fire’s significance in the greater scope of labor reform. Documents from newspaper reports to the personal stories of labor agitators and fire survivors continue the story, giving voice to the "girl strikers," their enemies and upper-class allies in the effort to reform the garment industry, and the public outrage that followed the fire. Document headnotes, a chronology, questions for consideration, a selected bibliography, and an index enrich students’ understanding of this historical moment.

    Careful study of the Nat Turner slave rebellion of 1831 reveals much about master, slaves, and the relationship between them in the antebellum South. The central document in this volume — Nat Turner's confession follwing the rebellion in Virginia — is supported by newspaper articles, trial transcripts, and excerpts from the diary of Virginia governor John Floyd.

    But the Puritans and the shining city on the hill give us just one way to understand the United States. Rather than recite American history from a Christian vantage point, Peter Manseau proves that what really happened is worth a close, fresh look.Thomas Jefferson himself collected books on all religions and required that the brand new Library of Congress take his books, since Americans needed to consider the "twenty gods or no god" he famously noted were revered by his neighbors. Looking at the Americans who believed in these gods, Manseau fills in America's story of itself, from the persecuted "witches" at Salem and who they really were, to the persecuted Buddhists in WWII California, from spirituality and cults in the '60s to the recent presidential election where both candidates were for the first time non-traditional Christians.One Nation, Under Gods shows how much more there is to the history we tell ourselves, right back to the country's earliest days. Dazzling in its scope and sweep, it is an American history unlike any you've read.

    If you buy only one book on the Vietnam War, this is the one you want. -Chicago TribuneChristian G. Appy's monumental oral history of the Vietnam War is the first work to probe the war's path through both the United States and Vietnam. These vivid testimonies of 135 men and women span the entire history of the Vietnam conflict, from its murky origins in the 1940s to the chaotic fall of Saigon in 1975. Sometimes detached and reflective, often raw and emotional, they allow us to see and feel what this war meant to people literally on all sides: Americans and Vietnamese, generals and grunts, policymakers and protesters, guerrillas and CIA operatives, pilots and doctors, artists and journalists, and a variety of ordinary citizens whose lives were swept up in a cataclysm that killed three million people. By turns harrowing, inspiring, and revelatory, Patriots is not a chronicle of facts and figures but a vivid human history of the war.A gem of a book, as informative and compulsively readable as it is timely. -The Washington Post Book World

    As Elizabeth Varon shows, disunion connoted the dissolution of the republic--the failure of the founders' effort to establish a stable and lasting representative government. For many Americans in both the North and the South, disunion was a nightmare, a cataclysm that would plunge the nation into the kind of fear and misery that seemed to pervade the rest of the world. For many others, however, disunion was seen as the main instrument by which they could achieve their partisan and sectional goals. Varon blends political history with intellectual, cultural, and gender history to examine the ongoing debates over disunion that long preceded the secession crisis of 1860-61.

    He gave the signal almost at dusk, and the Confederates rushed forward to utter devastation. This book describes the events and causes of the five-hour battle in gripping detail, particularly focusing on the reasons for such slaughter at a time when the outcome of the war had already been decided. The genesis of the senseless tragedy, according to McDonough and Connelly, lay in the appointment of Hood to command the Army of Tennessee. It was his decision to throw a total force of some 20,000 men into an ill-advised frontal assault against the Union troops. The Confederates made their approach, without substantial artillery support, on a level of some two miles. Why did Hood select such a catastrophic strategy? The authors analyze his reasoning in full. Their vivid and moving narrative, with statements from eyewitnesses to the battle, makes compelling reading for all Civil War buffs and historians.

    The entire South—its people, culture, history, customs, both past and present—has been and continues to be lied about and demonized by the unholy trinity of the American establishment: Academia, Hollywood, and the Media. In the midst of the anti-South hysteria currently infecting the American psyche—the banning of flags, charges of hate and “racism,” the removal and attempted removal of Confederate monuments, the renaming of schools, vandalism of monuments and property displaying the Confederate Battle Flag, and even physical assaults, albeit rarely at present, on people who display the symbols of the South — Shotwell Publishing offers this unapologetic, unreconstructed, pro-South book with the hope that it will reach those who are left that are not afraid to question the sanity of this cultural purge and the veracity of its narrative concerning the South.

    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.

    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.

    Lengel delivers an entertaining and erudite history of America's Founding Father. In Inventing George Washington, a captivating counterpart to Lengel’s General George Washington: A Military Life, the historian looks at Washington’s life and writings, at the creation of his mythos, and at what his legacy means for our nation and ourselves.

    Escaping Salem reconstructs the other witch hunt of 1692 that took place in Stamford, Connecticut. Concise and accessible, the book takes students on a revealing journey into the mental world of early America, shattering the stereotype of early New Englanders as quick to accuse and condemn. Drawing on eyewitness testimony, Richard Godbeer tells the story of Kate Branch, a seventeen-year-old afflicted by strange visions and given to blood-chilling wails of pain and fright. Branch accused several women of bewitching her, two of whom were put on trial for witchcraft. Escaping Salem takes us inside the Connecticut courtroom and into the minds of the surprisingly skeptical Stamford townspeople. Were the pain and screaming due to natural or supernatural causes? Was Branch simply faking the symptoms? And if she was indeed bewitched, why believe her specific accusations, since her information came from demons who might well be lying? For the judges, Godbeer shows, the trial was a legal thicket. All agreed that witches posed a real and serious threat, but proving witchcraft (an invisible crime) in court was another matter. The court in Salem had become mired in controversy over its use of dubious evidence. In an intriguing chapter, Godbeer examines Magistrate Jonathan Selleck's notes on how to determine the guilt of someone accused of witchcraft, providing an illuminating look at what constituted proof of witchcraft at the time. The stakes were high--if found guilty, the two accused women would be hanged. In the afterword, Godbeer explains how he used the trial evidence to build his narrative, offering an inside perspective on the historian's craft. Featuring maps, photos, and a selected bibliography, Escaping Salem is ideal for use in undergraduate U.S. survey courses. It can also be used for courses in colonial American history, culture, and religion; witchcraft in the early modern world; and crime and society in early America.