United States History

Hispanic America, Texas, and the Mexican War examines the history of the southwestern area of the United States. Topics covered include the settlement of the area that became the southwestern portion of the United States, detailing how it evolved from land settled by Native Americans, to Spanish territory, to states that were pawns between the North and South prior to the Civil War.

Situated in a barren desert landscape, Las Vegas exists for one reason—water. Popular as a waystation for travelers, the Las Vegas Valley attracted the attention of railroad visionaries at the end of the 19th century. After purchasing land from a local widow, the developers laid out a town in 1905. Vegas hasn’t slowed down since.

Historian David Williams has written the first account of the American Civil War as viewed though the eyes of ordinary people - foot soldiers, slaves, women, prisoners of war, draft resisters, Native Americans, and others. Richly illuminated with little-known anecdotes and firsthand testimony, this path-breaking narrative moves beyond presidents and generals to tell a new and powerful story about America's most destructive conflict.

This first complete account of the Lakota Indians traces their rich and often surprising history from the early 16th to the early 21st century. Pekka Hämäläinen explores the Lakotas' roots as marginal hunter-gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America's great commercial artery, and then - in what was America's first sweeping westward expansion - as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains.

The American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the ideal framework for a democratic, prosperous nation. Alan Taylor, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, gives us a different creation story in this magisterial history of the nation's founding. Rising out of the continental rivalries of European empires and their native allies, Taylor's Revolution builds like a ground fire overspreading Britain's mainland colonies, fueled by local conditions, destructive, hard to quell.

Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in his myth-shattering The Other Slavery, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of thousands of natives who were kidnapped and enslaved by the conquistadors, then forced to descend into the "mouth of hell" of 18th-century silver mines or, later, made to serve as domestics for Mormon settlers and rich Anglos.

Blood Moon is the story of the century-long blood feud between two rival Cherokee chiefs from the early years of the United States through the infamous Trail of Tears and into the Civil War. While little remembered today, their mutual hatred shaped the tragic history of the tribe far more than anyone, even the reviled President Andrew Jackson, ever did.

The American Revolution was at once a war for independence, a civil war, and a world war, fought by neighbors on American farms and between global powers an ocean or more away. Historian Geoffrey C. Ward ably steers us through the international forces at play, telling the story not from the top down but from the bottom up—and through the eyes of not only our “Founding Fathers” but also those of ordinary soldiers, as well as underrepresented populations, asking who exactly was entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

North America was settled by people with distinct religious, political, and ethnographic characteristics, creating regional cultures that have been at odds with one another ever since. Subsequent immigrants didn't confront or assimilate into an "American" or "Canadian" culture, but rather into one of the 11 distinct regional ones that spread over the continent each staking out mutually exclusive territory. In American Nations, Colin Woodard leads us on a journey through the history of our fractured continent....

Following the end of the Civil War, Mississippians responded to broader movements in the country, to changes in the economy, and to congressional initiatives as they worked to recover from the devastation of war and pursue new expressions of freedom. Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1862-1877 is a compelling account of how Black Mississippians embraced this freedom and how white Mississippians could not.

Under martial law during World War II, Hawai'i was located at the intersection of home front and war front. In Settler Militarism, Juliet Nebolon shows how settler colonialism and militarization simultaneously perpetuated, legitimated, and concealed one another in wartime Hawai'i for the purposes of empire building in Asia and the Pacific Islands.

In the quiet valleys of southern Utah, in 1857, over 120 men, women, and children from Arkansas were brutally murdered by Mormon settlers and their allies. It was one of the darkest chapters in American frontier history—an event that has long remained shrouded in silence, misdirection, and denial. The Mountain Meadows Massacre is more than a historical crime; it is a story of how fear, fanaticism, and blind allegiance to religious authority can lead to devastating consequences. And for far too long, it has been treated as an inconvenient footnote by those who should have faced it head-on.

In August 1776, a little over a month after the Continental Congress had formally declared independence from Britain, the revolution was on the verge of a sudden and disastrous end. General George Washington found his troops outmanned and outmaneuvered at the Battle of Brooklyn, and it looked like there was no escape. But thanks to a series of desperate rear-guard attacks by a single heroic regiment, famously known as the Immortal 400, Washington was able to evacuate his men, and the nascent Continental Army lived to fight another day.

Former CNN/HLN anchor and veteran broadcast journalist Susan Hendricks takes an investigative deep-dive into the still-unsolved double homicide of two teens in Delphi, Indiana—and its lasting impact on the community On February 13, 2017, two teenage girls—13-year-old Abby Williams and...

This national best seller is an entertaining, informative, and sometimes shocking expose of the way history is taught to American students. Lies My Teacher Told Me won the American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship.

For decades, government pundits have dismissed these "coincidental" deaths, even regarding them as "myths" as "urban legends." Like most people, Richard and David were initially unsure about what to make of these 'coincidences'. After all, events don't "consult the odds" prior to happening; they simply happen. Then someone comes along later and figures out what the odds of it happening were. Some of the deaths seemed purely coincidental; heart attacks, hunting accidents.

For hunters, listening to the accounts of kindred spirits recalling the drama and action that go with good days afield ranks among life's most pleasurable activities. Here, then, are some of the best hunting tales ever written, stories that sweep from charging lions in the African bush to mountain goats in the mountain crags of the Rockies; from the gallant bird dogs of the Southern pinelands to the great Western hunts of Theodore Roosevelt.

With over 20 years of research, Esslinger, author of Alcatraz: Definitive History of the Penitentiary Years, has salvaged and compiled an extraordinary collection of inmates' letters, many never before published. Letters From Alcatraz includes a foreword by former Alcatraz Officer Larry Quilligan and over 125 letters and original correspondence from inmates both on-and-off the Rock.

In this third volume of Michael Logusz's epic study of the Wilderness War of 1777, a sizable British military force, augmented with German and loyalist soldiers, attacks the Northern Army's southern front in the fall of 1777 in hopes of assisting a much larger British Army that is threatened to the north of New York City in the wilderness region of Saratoga.

From the time of the Greeks and the Persians clashing in the Mediterranean, sea power has determined world power. To an extent that is often underappreciated, it still does. No one understands this better than Admiral Jim Stavridis. In Sea Power, Admiral Stavridis takes us with him on a tour of the world's oceans from the admiral's chair, showing us how the geography of the oceans has shaped the destinies of nations and how naval power has in a real sense made the world we live in today and will shape the world we live in tomorrow.