To understand this pivotal moment in U.S. history, one has to understand the man at its center; and to understand that man and his masterful performance under extraordinary pressure, one can do no better than to read Moody’s thoroughly absorbing, richly detailed biography.
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.
He may be little known today, but Ben Daniels was a feared gunman who typified the journeyman gunfighter every bit as much as those whose names have become legend. Yet his story has eluded researchers and yarn-spinners alike—until now. Two prominent western historians have teamed up to tell the story of Ben Daniels’s rise from outlaw and convict to presidential protégé and high-ranking officer of the law. Tracing his life from jailhouse to White House, from Dodge City to San Juan Hill, Robert DeArment and Jack DeMattos present a full-length biography of Daniels, the most controversial of Teddy Roosevelt’s “White House Gunfighters.”
Woody Guthrie emerges from these pages as a figure whose immense artistic output reflects the nation’s conflicted engagement with modernity. Capturing the breathtaking social and technological changes that took place during his extraordinarily productive career, Woody Guthrie’s Modern World Blues offers a unique and much-needed new perspective on a musical icon.
Francisco Garcés and the Spanish Encounter with the American Southwest
by Jeremy Beer
Consulting archives on three continents, including previously untapped sources and Garcés’s extensive diaries and letters, long obscured by unyielding language and handwriting, Beer crafts a nuanced and thoroughly engaging account of this incomparable explorer, groundbreaking missionary, and central actor in New Spain’s final sustained effort to expand its dominion into the lands that would become the American Southwest.
A controversial character largely known (as depicted in the movie Glory) as a Union colonel who led Black soldiers in the Civil War, James Montgomery (1814–71) waged a far more personal and radical war against slavery than popular history suggests. It is the true story of this militant abolitionist that Todd Mildfelt and David D. Schafer tell in Abolitionist of the Most Dangerous Kind, summoning a life fiercely lived in struggle against the expansion of slavery into the West and during the Civil War.
If we do in fact “remember the Alamo,” it is largely thanks to one person who witnessed the final assault and survived: the commanding officer’s slave, a young man known simply as Joe. What Joe saw as the Alamo fell, recounted days later to the Texas Cabinet, has come down to us in records and newspaper reports. But who Joe was, where he came from, and what happened to him have all remained mysterious until now. In a remarkable feat of historical detective work, authors Ron J. Jackson, Jr., and Lee Spencer White have fully restored this pivotal yet elusive figure to his place in the American story.
A long-overdue in-depth look at one of the preeminent Mexican Americans in nineteenth-century California, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo also provides an unprecedented view of the Mexican American experience during that transformative era.
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.
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.
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