BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Historical
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A Boyhood in the Dust Bowl, 1926–1934
Okemah, Oklahoma, where Woody Guthrie once lived and wrote songs, was fighting for its existence in the late 1920s and early 1930s as the oil boom ended, cotton fell to ten cents a pound, and Prohibition was in force. Yet this grim scenario frames Robert Rutland’s colorful remembrance of a youth filled with adventure, characters, curiosity, and love. Here is the true story of a little boy who found life full of excitement, wonder, and joy in a small town on the southern plains.
Jayhawkers
The Civil War Brigade of James Henry Lane
No person excited greater emotion in Kansas than James Henry Lane, the U.S. senator who led a volunteer brigade in 1861–1862. In fighting numerous skirmishes, liberating hundreds of slaves, burning portions of four towns, and murdering half a dozen men, Lane and his brigade garnered national attention as the saviors of Kansas and the terror of Missouri. An entertaining story rich in detail, Jayhawkers will captivate scholars and history enthusiasts as it sheds new light on the unfettered violence on this western fringe of the Civil War.
Amelia Stone Quinton and the Women's National Indian Association
A Legacy of Indian Reform
With reference to Quinton’s voluminous writings—including her letters, speeches, and newspapers articles—as well as WNIA literature, Mathes draws a complex picture of an organization that at times ignored traditional Indian practices and denied individual agency, even as it provided dispossessed and impoverished people with healthcare and adequate housing. And at the center of this picture we find Quinton, a woman and reformer of her time.
Marie Mason Potts
The Lettered Life of a California Indian Activist
Potts’s voluminous correspondence documents her steadfast conviction that California Indians deserved just compensation for their stolen ancestral lands, a decent standard of living, the right to practice their traditions, and political agency in their own affairs. Drawing extensively from this trove of writings, Castaneda privileges Potts’s own voice in the telling of her story and offers a valuable history of California Indians in the twentieth century.
So They Remember
A Jewish Family’s Story of Surviving the Holocaust in Soviet Ukraine
In March 1944, the Red Army liberated Motl’s family and fellow captives. Yet for decades, according to the author, they were silenced by Soviet policies enacted to erase all memory of Jewish wartime suffering. So They Remember gives voice to this long-repressed history and documents how the events at Pechera and other surrounding camps and ghettos would continue to shape remaining survivors and their descendants.
Napoleon's Enfant Terrible
General Dominique Vandamme
A dedicated career soldier and excellent division and corps commander, Dominique Vandamme was a thorn in the side of practically every officer he served. Outspoken to a fault, he even criticized Napoleon, whom he never forgave for not appointing him marshal. His military prowess so impressed the emperor, however, that he returned Vandamme to command time and again. In this first book-length study of Vandamme in English, John G. Gallaher traces the career of one of Napoleon’s most successful midrank officers.
Hero Street, U.S.A.
The Story of Little Mexico's Fallen Soldiers
Claro Solis wanted to win a gold star for his mother. He succeeded—as did seven other sons of “Little Mexico.”Second Street in Silvis, Illinois, was a poor neighborhood during the...
Agnes Lake Hickok
Queen of the Circus, Wife of a Legend
The first woman in America to own and operate a circus, Agnes Lake spent thirty years under the Big Top before becoming the wife of Wild Bill Hickok—a mere five months before he was killed. Although books abound on the famous lawman, Agnes’s life has remained obscured by circus myth and legend. This account of a remarkable life cuts through fictions about Agnes’s life, including her own embellishments, to uncover her true story. Numerous illustrations, including rare photographs and circus memorabilia, bring Agnes’s world to life.
Quest for Flight
John J. Montgomery and the Dawn of Aviation in the West
The Wright brothers have long received the lion’s share of credit for inventing the airplane. But a California scientist succeeded in flying gliders twenty years before the Wright’s powered flights at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Quest for Flight reveals the amazing accomplishments of John J. Montgomery, a prolific inventor who piloted the glider he designed in 1883 in the first controlled flights of a heavier-than-air craft in the Western Hemisphere.
The Chisholm Trail
Joseph McCoy's Great Gamble
The Chisholm Trail follows McCoy’s vision and the effects of the Chisholm Trail from post–Civil War Texas and Kansas to the multimillion-dollar beef industry that remade the Great Plains, the American diet, and the national and international beef trade.

A Boyhood in the Dust Bowl, 1926–1934
Okemah, Oklahoma, where Woody Guthrie once lived and wrote songs, was fighting for its existence in the late 1920s and early 1930s as the oil boom ended, cotton fell to ten cents a pound, and Prohibition was in force. Yet this grim scenario frames Robert Rutland’s colorful remembrance of a youth filled with adventure, characters, curiosity, and love. Here is the true story of a little boy who found life full of excitement, wonder, and joy in a small town on the southern plains.
Jayhawkers
The Civil War Brigade of James Henry Lane
No person excited greater emotion in Kansas than James Henry Lane, the U.S. senator who led a volunteer brigade in 1861–1862. In fighting numerous skirmishes, liberating hundreds of slaves, burning portions of four towns, and murdering half a dozen men, Lane and his brigade garnered national attention as the saviors of Kansas and the terror of Missouri. An entertaining story rich in detail, Jayhawkers will captivate scholars and history enthusiasts as it sheds new light on the unfettered violence on this western fringe of the Civil War.
Amelia Stone Quinton and the Women's National Indian Association
A Legacy of Indian Reform
With reference to Quinton’s voluminous writings—including her letters, speeches, and newspapers articles—as well as WNIA literature, Mathes draws a complex picture of an organization that at times ignored traditional Indian practices and denied individual agency, even as it provided dispossessed and impoverished people with healthcare and adequate housing. And at the center of this picture we find Quinton, a woman and reformer of her time.
Marie Mason Potts
The Lettered Life of a California Indian Activist
Potts’s voluminous correspondence documents her steadfast conviction that California Indians deserved just compensation for their stolen ancestral lands, a decent standard of living, the right to practice their traditions, and political agency in their own affairs. Drawing extensively from this trove of writings, Castaneda privileges Potts’s own voice in the telling of her story and offers a valuable history of California Indians in the twentieth century.
So They Remember
A Jewish Family’s Story of Surviving the Holocaust in Soviet Ukraine
In March 1944, the Red Army liberated Motl’s family and fellow captives. Yet for decades, according to the author, they were silenced by Soviet policies enacted to erase all memory of Jewish wartime suffering. So They Remember gives voice to this long-repressed history and documents how the events at Pechera and other surrounding camps and ghettos would continue to shape remaining survivors and their descendants.
Napoleon's Enfant Terrible
General Dominique Vandamme
A dedicated career soldier and excellent division and corps commander, Dominique Vandamme was a thorn in the side of practically every officer he served. Outspoken to a fault, he even criticized Napoleon, whom he never forgave for not appointing him marshal. His military prowess so impressed the emperor, however, that he returned Vandamme to command time and again. In this first book-length study of Vandamme in English, John G. Gallaher traces the career of one of Napoleon’s most successful midrank officers.
Hero Street, U.S.A.
The Story of Little Mexico's Fallen Soldiers
Claro Solis wanted to win a gold star for his mother. He succeeded—as did seven other sons of “Little Mexico.”Second Street in Silvis, Illinois, was a poor neighborhood during the...
Agnes Lake Hickok
Queen of the Circus, Wife of a Legend
The first woman in America to own and operate a circus, Agnes Lake spent thirty years under the Big Top before becoming the wife of Wild Bill Hickok—a mere five months before he was killed. Although books abound on the famous lawman, Agnes’s life has remained obscured by circus myth and legend. This account of a remarkable life cuts through fictions about Agnes’s life, including her own embellishments, to uncover her true story. Numerous illustrations, including rare photographs and circus memorabilia, bring Agnes’s world to life.
Quest for Flight
John J. Montgomery and the Dawn of Aviation in the West
The Wright brothers have long received the lion’s share of credit for inventing the airplane. But a California scientist succeeded in flying gliders twenty years before the Wright’s powered flights at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Quest for Flight reveals the amazing accomplishments of John J. Montgomery, a prolific inventor who piloted the glider he designed in 1883 in the first controlled flights of a heavier-than-air craft in the Western Hemisphere.
The Chisholm Trail
Joseph McCoy's Great Gamble
The Chisholm Trail follows McCoy’s vision and the effects of the Chisholm Trail from post–Civil War Texas and Kansas to the multimillion-dollar beef industry that remade the Great Plains, the American diet, and the national and international beef trade.