History West United States

In the minds of many Americans, the name of Jesse James and the Wild West are practically synonymous. Jesse James was a robber, a murderer, and a notorious outlaw, who carried as many weapons as he could. He could shoot with both hands while he held the reins of his horse in his teeth. He was an extremely popular man in his day, a phenomenon that he readily accepted because he was a person who craved attention.

Unquestionably, Spain and Great Britain would have been engaged in an unequal controversy for possession of the richest portion of North America, but for the intervention of a new claimant. The young Republic....

Luck o' the Draw is a rollicking tale of Irish gunfighters who roamed the remote vastness of 19th century Nevada. In a labor of love, Karen Wilkes takes us into her personal search to uncover the hidden history of the notorious desperadoes who populated her hometown of Pioche—many of whom ended up in the legendary Boot Hill graveyard she could see from her living room window.

The requirements needed to be a peace officer in the Wild West were often determined only by the individual's skill with a gun, and their courage. At times, judgment was needed with only seconds to determine it, and that also meant that there was the odd occasion where justice and law never quite meant the same thing. The expression "justice without law" was never truer than in the formative years of the West.

The Katrina List: An Untold Story of Hurricane Katrina offers an intimate and powerful account of one of America’s most devastating disasters. Going beyond headlines and statistics, it captures the raw human experiences of those who endured the storm—stories of survival, separation, and resilience. Through overlooked personal narratives, it exposes the emotional toll of loss and the failures of government response. This audiobook also highlights the importance of remembrance, showcasing the Katrina National Memorial Museum’s role in preserving these voices for future generations.

Within this audiobook, the listener will meet a 19-year-old Texas Ranger figuratively dying to shoot his gun. He does get to shoot at people, but soon realizes what he thought was a bargain, exacted a steep price. Another tale is of an old-school cowman who shut down illicit traffic in stolen livestock that had existed for years on the Llano Estacado. He was tough, salty, and had no quarter for cow thieves, or sympathy for any mealy-mouthed politicians. He cleaned house, maybe not too nicely, but he was unarguably successful.

The American women’s movement has been shrouded in myths, argue three leading scholars in this bold and revisionist history. Eschewing the conventional wisdom that places the origins of the American women’s movement in the nostalgic glow of the late 1960s, Feminism Unfinished traces the beginnings of this seminal American social movement to the 1920s, in the process creating an expanded, historical narrative that dramatically rewrites a century of American women’s history.

Frazier has made use of previously untapped primary sources, allowing him to present new interpretations of the famous Civil War battles in the Southwest. Using narratives of veterans of the campaign and official Confederate and Union documents, the author explains how this seemingly far-fetched fantasy of building a Confederate empire was an essential part of the Confederate strategy.

In this thrilling story of intellectual and archaeological discovery, David Roberts recounts his last 20 years of far-flung exploits in search of spectacular prehistoric ruins and rock art panels known to very few modern travelers. His adventures range across Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado, and illuminate the mysteries of the Ancestral Puebloans and their contemporary neighbors the Mogollon and Fremont, as well as of the more recent Navajo and Comanche.

In July 1776 a pair of Franciscan friars, Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Velez de Escalante, were charged by the governor of New Mexico with discovering a route across the unknown Southwest to the new Spanish colony in California. They had other goals as well, some of them secret: converting the indigenous natives along the way to the true faith, discovering a semi-mythical paradise known as Teguayo, hunting for sources of gold and silver, and paving the way for Spanish settlements from Santa Fe to Monterey. In strict terms, the expedition failed.

An epic struggle over land, water, and power is erupting in the American West and the halls of Washington, DC. It began when a 4,000-square-mile area of Arizona desert called Black Mesa was divided between the Hopi and Navajo tribes. To the outside world, it was a land struggle between two fractious Indian tribes; to political insiders and energy corporations, it was a divide-and-conquer play for the 21 billion tons of coal beneath Black Mesa. Today, that coal powers cheap electricity for Los Angeles, a new water aqueduct into Phoenix, and the neon dazzle of Las Vegas.

The "settling" of the American West has been perceived throughout the world as a series of quaint, violent, and romantic adventures. But in fact, Patricia Nelson Limerick argues, the West has a history grounded primarily in economic reality - in hardheaded questions of profit, loss, competition, and consolidation. Here, she interprets the stories and the characters in a new way: The trappers, traders, Indians, farmers, oilmen, cowboys, and sheriffs of the Old West "meant business" in more ways than one, and their descendants mean business today.

Award-winning western historian Andrew R. Graybill now sheds light on the overlooked interracial Native-white relationships critical in the development of the trans-Mississippi West in this multigenerational saga. Beginning in 1844 with the marriage of Montana fur trader Malcolm Clarke and his Piegan Blackfeet bride, Coth-co-co-na, Graybill traces the family from the mid-nineteenth century, when such mixed marriages proliferated, to the first half of the twentieth, when Clarke ’s children and grandchildren often encountered virulent prejudice.

This is a concise history, intended for travellers, but of inestimable value to anyone looking for an overview of the Caribbean and its mainland coastal states, with a focus on the past few centuries. The history of the Caribbean does not make much sense without factoring in the cities - Pensacola, New Orleans, Galveston - and the ambitions of the states on its continental shores, notably the United States. This account is grounded in a look at the currents and channels of the sea, and its constraints, followed by the history of 'pre-contact' civilisations.

As Great Britain and France eyed the Illinois country and the Tennessee, Ohio, and Wabash River valleys for their respective empires, the Overhill Cherokees were coalescing and maintaining a conspicuous presence throughout the territory. Contrary to the traditional narrative of westward expansion, the Europeans were not the drivers behind the ensuing contest over the Tennessee corridor. The Overhills traded, negotiated, and fought with other Indigenous peoples along this corridor, in the process setting parameters for European expansion.

Steve Wiegand takes listeners across the post-Civil War Wild West in his 1876: The Year of the Gun. Wiegand introduces—or reintroduces—us to lawmen such as Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp and outlaws such as the Younger and James Brothers, as well as larger-than-life figures such as Buffalo Bill and George Custer. Juxtaposing their real lives with the often-outlandish accounts of their exploits, 1876 swings from lighthearted humor to cliff-hanger suspense. It also portrays how the Wild West’s initial, tantalizing promise of fame and glamour often disintegrated.

Many well-read students, historians, and loyal aficionados of Texas Ranger lore know the name of Texas Ranger Captain Frank Jones (1856-1893), who died on the Texas-Mexico border in a shootout with Mexican rustlers. In Six-Shooters and Shifting Sands, Bob Alexander has now penned the first full-length biography of this important 19th-century Texas Ranger....

The Old West was wilder than the movies. Picture cowboys, saloons, railroads, and outlaws. You might think you know the Wild West, but Hollywood’s Westerns didn’t tell you the whole story. Reality was even wilder than fiction. Walk through the swinging doors of Old West saloons, ride along on daring escapes, and dive into the showdowns between sheriffs and outlaws. This book will make you look at the Wild West in a new light. Discover what really made the West wild in Wild Life.

In 1874, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led a US Army expedition into the Black Hills of South Dakota, which was at that time under the control of the Lakota people. To the expedition members, this was unknown territory on the leading edge of the American frontier. The purpose of the expedition was not only to find a possible location for a fort and a route through the Black Hills to the Southwest but also to investigate rumors of gold deposits. Custer’s cavalry and infantry were accompanied by specialist miners and geologists whose role was to search for that gold.

In the early 1900s, two families in Scurry and Kent counties in West Texas united in a marriage of 14-year-old Gladys Johnson to 21-year-old Ed Sims. Billy Johnson, the father, set up Gladys and Ed on a ranch, and the young couple had two daughters. But Gladys was headstrong and willful, and Ed drank too much, and both sought affection outside their marriage.