Between May 1804 and September 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and their Corps of Discovery explored a new expanse of America known as the Louisiana Purchase. They encountered lands, rivers, and peoples previously unknown Americans east of the Mississippi. During the next sixty-five years, Lewis and Clark's journey was followed by other explorations of the West, from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean and from Canada to Mexico.Artists often accompanied explorers as they encountered the unexpected and unique subjects of the American West. Inspired by the thrill of adventure and the majesty of high mountains, great chasms, and wide-open spaces, artists became eyewitnesses and visual commentators of the changing shape of the frontier - and the tragic displacement of American Indian tribes. As these artists sought to capture on paper and canvas what they saw during their explorations and travels, they gave birth to American western art. After Lewis and Clark highlights more than sixty paintings, drawings, and prints in the collection of one of America's finest museums of American art, the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This richly illustrated book presents and places in aesthetic and historical context many of the priceless portraits, striking scenes, and grand landscapes inspired during the sixty-five years after the Corps of Discovery completed its epic journey. It features the works of notable artists of the nineteenth-century American West, including George Catlin, Karl Bodmer, Alfred Jacob Miller, Charles Bird King, Paul Kane, Seth Eastman, Carl Wimar, John Mix Stanley, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Moran.

Throughout the twentieth century, cities such as Houston, Galveston, New Orleans, and Mobile grappled with the safety hazards created by oil and gas industries as well as the role municipal governments should play in protecting the public from these threats. James B. McSwain's Petroleum and Public Safety reveals how officials in these cities created standards based on technical, scientific, and engineering knowledge to devise politically workable ordinances related to the storage and handling of fuel. Each of the cities studied in this volume struggled through protracted debates regarding the regulation of crude petroleum and fuel oil, sparked by the famous Spindletop strike of 1901 and the regional oil boom in the decades that followed. Municipal governments sought to ensure the safety of their citizens while still reaping lucrative economic benefits from local petroleum industry activities. Drawing on historical antecedents such as fire-protection engineering, the cities of the Gulf South came to adopt voluntary, consensual fire codes issued by insurance associations and standards organisations such as the National Board of Fire Underwriters, the National Fire Protection Association, and the Southern Standard Building Code Conference. The culmination of such efforts was the creation of the International Fire Code, an overarching fire-protection guide that is widely used in the United States, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America. In devising ordinances, Gulf South officials pursued the politics of risk management, as they hammered out strategies to eliminate or mitigate the dangers associated with petroleum industries and to reduce the possible consequences of catastrophic oil explosions and fires. Using an array of original sources, including newspapers, municipal records, fire-insurance documents, and risk-management literature, McSwain demonstrates that Gulf South cities played a vital role in twentieth-century modernization.

A compelling history of the national conflicts that resulted from efforts to produce the first definitive American dictionary of English The Dictionary Wars recounts the patriotic fervor in the early American republic to produce a definitive national dictionary that would rival Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. But what began as a cultural war of independence from Britain devolved into a battle among lexicographers, authors, scholars, and publishers, all vying for dictionary supremacy and shattering forever the dream of a unified American language. Peter Martin tells of the intense rivalry between America's first lexicographers, Noah Webster and Joseph Emerson Worcester, and how their conflict continued beyond Webster's death, when the ambitious Merriam brothers acquired publishing rights to Webster's American Dictionary. The dictionary wars also engaged America's colleges, libraries, newspapers, religious groups, and state legislatures at a pivotal historical moment that coincided with rising literacy and the print revolution. Delving into personal stories and national debates, The Dictionary Wars examines the linguistic struggles that underpinned the founding and growth of a nation.

A "New York Times "Notable Book of the Year
Scheduled for release in July 2007 as an ESPN original miniseries, starring John Turturro as Billy Martin, Oliver Platt as George Steinbrenner, and Daniel Sunjata as Reggie Jackson.
A kaleidoscopic portrait of New York City in 1977, "The Bronx Is Burning "is the story of two epic battles: the fight between Yankee Reggie Jackson and team manager Billy Martin, and the battle between Mario Cuomo and Ed Koch for the city's mayorship. Buried beneath these parallel conflicts--one for the soul of baseball, the other for the soul of the city--was the subtext of race.
Deftly intertwined by journalist Jonathan Mahler, these braided Big Apple narratives reverberate to reveal a year that also saw the opening of Studio 54, the acquisition of the "New York Post" by Rupert Murdoch, a murderer dubbed the "Son of Sam," the infamous blackout, and the evolution of punk rock. As Koch defeated Cuomo, and as Reggie Jackson rescued a team racked with dissension, 1977 became a year of survival--and also of hope.

On October 19, 1781, General Cornwallis surrendered his British army to the combined American and French forces at Yorktown, Virginia. In addition to ending hostilities, this act represented the close of British colonial rule and the dawn of America's ascent as an independent country and eventual world power. The events of this revolutionary time were the foundation of a growing American identity, and tributes to the sacrifices and victories of these early patriots continue even today. Yorktown, Virginia, has been celebrating the surrender of the British in large, nationally renowned celebrations since its first anniversary. Local author Kathleen Manley chronicles the history of Yorktown and the victory celebrations that have been undertaken through the generations to remember this historic time in America's infancy.

Americans did not at first cherish the idea of political severance from their mother country. In just a few years, however, they came to desire indepen-dence above all else. What brought about this change of feeling and how did it affect the lives of their citizens? To answer these questions, Edmund S. Morgan looks at three men who may fairly be called the "architects of independence," the first presidents of the United States. Anecdotes from their letters and diaries recapture the sense of close identity many early Americans felt with their country's political struggles. Through this perspective, Morgan examines the growth of independence from its initial declaration and discovers something of its meaning, for three men who responded to its challenge and for the nation that they helped create.

"The Meaning of Independence, " first published in 1976, has become one of the standard short works on the first three presidents of the United States--George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. When the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association and the Organization of American Historians asked 1,500 historians to name the ten best books about George Washington, this book was one of those selected. In this updated edition, the author provides a new preface to address a few remaining concerns he has pondered in the quarter century since first publication.

Tag: A classic work on the founding by the author of the bestselling Benjamin Franklin

"A stunning and ambitious origins story."-Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning and #1 New York Times-bestselling author The remarkable history of how college presidents shaped the struggle for racial equality Some of America's most pressing civil rights issues-desegregation, equal educational and employment opportunities, housing discrimination, and free speech-have been closely intertwined with higher education institutions. Although it is commonly known that college students and other activists, as well as politicians, actively participated in the fight for and against civil rights in the middle decades of the twentieth century, historical accounts have not adequately focused on the roles that the nation's college presidents played in the debates concerning racism. Based on archival research conducted at a range of colleges and universities across the United States, The Campus Color Line sheds light on the important place of college presidents in the struggle for racial parity. Focusing on the period between 1948 and 1968, Eddie Cole shows how college presidents, during a time of violence and unrest, strategically, yet often silently, initiated and shaped racial policies and practices inside and outside of the educational sphere. With courage and hope, as well as malice and cruelty, college presidents positioned themselves-sometimes precariously-amid conflicting interests and demands. Black college presidents challenged racist policies as their students demonstrated in the streets against segregation, while presidents of major universities lobbied for urban renewal programs that displaced Black communities near campus. Some presidents amended campus speech practices to accommodate white supremacist speakers, even as other academic leaders developed the nation's first affirmative action programs in higher education. The Campus Color Line illuminates how the legacy of academic leaders' actions continues to influence the unfinished struggle for Black freedom and racial equity in education and beyond.

Robert Dallek's brilliant two-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson has received an avalanche of praise. Michael Beschloss, in The Los Angeles Times, said that it "succeeds brilliantly." The New York Times called it "rock solid" and The Washington Post hailed it as "invaluable." And Sidney Blumenthal in The Boston Globe wrote that it was "dense with astonishing incidents."
Now Dallek has condensed his two-volume masterpiece into what is surely the finest one-volume biography of Johnson available. Based on years of research in over 450 manuscript collections and oral histories, as well as numerous personal interviews, this biography follows Johnson, the "human dynamo," from the Texas hill country to the White House. We see LBJ, in the House and the Senate, whirl his way through sixteen- and eighteen-hour days, talking, urging, demanding, reaching for influence and power, in an uncommonly successful congressional career. Then, in the White House, we see Johnson as the visionary leader who worked his will on Congress like no president before or since, enacting a range of crucial legislation, from Medicare and environmental protection to the most significant advances in civil rights for black Americans ever achieved. And we see the depth of Johnson's private anguish as he became increasingly ensnared in Vietnam.
In these pages Johnson emerges as a man of towering intensity and anguished insecurity, of grandiose ambition and grave self-doubt, a man who was brilliant, crude, intimidating, compassionate, overbearing, driven: "A tornado in pants." Gracefully written and delicately balanced, this

A concise history of how American law has shaped-and been shaped by-the experience of contagion"Contrarians and the civic-minded alike will find Witt's legal survey a fascinating resource"-Kirkus, starred review "Professor Witt's book is an original and thoughtful contribution to the interdisciplinary study of disease and American law. Although he covers the broad sweep of the American experience of epidemics from yellow fever to COVID-19, he is especially timely in his exploration of the legal background to the current disaster of the American response to the coronavirus. A thought-provoking, readable, and important work."-Frank Snowden, author of Epidemics and Society From yellow fever to smallpox to polio to AIDS to COVID-19, epidemics have prompted Americans to make choices and answer questions about their basic values and their laws. In five concise chapters, historian John Fabian Witt traces the legal history of epidemics, showing how infectious disease has both shaped, and been shaped by, the law. Arguing that throughout American history legal approaches to public health have been liberal for some communities and authoritarian for others, Witt shows us how history's answers to the major questions brought up by previous epidemics help shape our answers today: What is the relationship between individual liberty and the common good? What is the role of the federal government, and what is the role of the states? Will long-standing traditions of government and law give way to the social imperatives of an epidemic? Will we let the inequities of our mixed tradition continue?

The evidence of women in the Americas is conspicuously absent from most historical syntheses of the Spanish invasion and early colonisation of the New World. Karen Powers's ethnohistoric account is the first to focus on non-military incidents during this transformative period. As she shows, native women's lives were changed dramatically. This book uncovers the activities and experiences of women, shows how the intersection of gender, race, and class shaped their lives, and reveals the sometimes hidden ways they were integrated into social institutions. Powers' premise is that women were demoted in status across race and class and that some women resisted this trend. She describes the ways women made spaces for themselves in colonial society, in the economy, and in convents as well as other religious arenas, such as witchcraft. She shows how violence and intimidation were used to control women and writes about the place of sexual relations, especially miscegenation, in the forging of colonial social and economic structures.

Set in the first decade of modern Israel's existence, this volume offers an insightful look at the changing relationship of American Jews and the reborn Jewish nation/state. It is the first in-depth analysis of the subject during this key period. As the Cold War rages, leaders in all camps are shown attempting to shape and control the tangled circumstances that engulf them - especially American Jewish Committee president Jacob Blaustein, Israeli founding father David Ben-Gurion, and American presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Tapping into private correspondence, diaries, oral history interviews, scholarly literature and other archival materials, Zvi Ganin provides a richly detailed look at motivations, passions, and attitudes of Jewish and Israeli leaders on numerous issues - none more affecting than in the stormy debate over dual loyalty.

The story of America's westward migration is a powerful blend of fact and fable. Over the course of three decades, almost a million eager fortune-hunters, pioneers, and visionaries transformed the face of a continent - and displaced its previous inhabitants. The people who made the long and perilous journey over the Oregon and California trails drove this swift and astonishing change. In this magisterial volume, Will Bagley tells why and how this massive emigration began.While many previous authors have told parts of this story, Bagley has recast it in its entirety for modern readers. Drawing on research he conducted for the National Park Service's Long Distance Trails Office, he has woven a wealth of primary sources - personal letters and journals, government documents, newspaper reports, and folk accounts - into a compelling narrative that reinterprets the first years of overland migration. Illustrated with photographs and historical maps, So Rugged and Mountainous is the first of a projected four-volume history, Overland West: The Story of the Oregon and California Trails. This sweeping series describes how the ""Road across the Plains"" transformed the American West and became an enduring part of its legacy. And by showing that overland emigration would not have been possible without the cooperation of Native peoples and tribes, it places American Indians at the center of trail history, not on its margins.

First published in the early 20th century, this book contributed significantly to an understanding of the forces at work in the evolution of family institutions in the United States. The first of a three-volume series, the text describes the American family as a product primarily of European folkways, economic transition to modern capitalism, and its distinctive environment - a virgin continent. Exhaustive in its use of primary and secondary sources, The American Family in the Colonial Period will be invaluable to students of early American history and of interest to all who enjoy reading about America's past and its early settlers.

Totkv Mocvse/New Fire presents the work of Earnest Gouge, an important early Creek (Muskogee) author, and makes available for the first time-in Creel and English - the myths and legends of a major American Indian tribe.In 1915, Earnest Gouge was encouraged by ethnographer John Reed Swanton to record Creek legends and myths. Gouge's manuscript lay in the National Anthropological Archives for eighty-five years until two Creek-speaking sisters, Margaret McKane Mauldin and Juanita McGirt, and linguist Jack B. Martin, began translating and editing the document. In Totkv Mocvse/New Fire, Gouge's stories appear in parallel format, with the Creek text alongside the English translation. The stories cover many themes, from the humorous allegories of Rabbit, Wolf, and other personified animals, to hunting stories designed to frighten a nighttime audience in the woods. An insightful foreword by Craig Womack and Jack Martin's introduction frame the stories within Creek literature and history. Martin and Mauldin also provide brief introductions to each story, highlighting key elements of Creek culture.