"Riveting...A great read, full of colorful characters and outrageous confrontations back when the west was still wild." --George R.R. Martin A propulsive and panoramic history of one of the most dramatic stories never told--the greatest railroad war of all time, fought by the daring leaders of the Santa Fe and the Rio Grande to seize, control, and create the American West. It is difficult to imagine now, but for all its gorgeous scenery, the American West might have been barren tundra as far as most Americans knew well into the 19th century. While the West was advertised as a paradise on earth to citizens in the East and Midwest, many believed the journey too hazardous to be worthwhile--until 1869, when the first transcontinental railroad changed the face of transportation. Railroad companies soon became the rulers of western expansion, choosing routes, creating brand-new railroad towns, and building up remote settlements like Santa Fe, Albuquerque, San Diego, and El Paso into proper cities. But thinning federal grants left the routes incomplete, an opportunity that two brash new railroad men, armed with private investments and determination to build an empire across the Southwest clear to the Pacific, soon seized, leading to the greatest railroad war in American history. In From the River to the Sea, bestselling author John Sedgwick recounts, in vivid and thrilling detail, the decade-long fight between General William J. Palmer, the Civil War hero leading the "little family" of his Rio Grande, and William Barstow Strong, the hard-nosed manager of the corporate-minded Santa Fe. What begins as an accidental rivalry when the two lines cross in Colorado soon evolves into an all-out battle as each man tries to outdo the other--claiming exclusive routes through mountains, narrow passes, and the richest silver mines in the world; enlisting private armies to protect their land and lawyers to find loopholes; dispatching spies to gain information; and even using the power of the press and incurring the wrath of the God-like Robber Baron Jay Gould--to emerge victorious. By the end of the century, one man will fade into anonymity and disgrace. The other will achieve unparalleled success--and in the process, transform a sleepy backwater of thirty thousand called "Los Angeles" into a booming metropolis that will forever change the United States. Filled with colorful characters and high drama, told at the speed of a locomotive, From the River to the Sea is an unforgettable piece of American history "that seems to demand a big-screen treatment" (The New Yorker).

THE ENDURING VISION: A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, VOLUME 2: SINCE 1865, 8E, International Edition's engaging narrative integrates political, social, and cultural history within a chronological framework. Known for its focus on the environment and the land, the text is also praised for its innovative coverage of cultural history, public health and medicine, and the West--including Native American history. The eighth edition incorporates new scholarship throughout, includes a variety of new photos, and brings the discussion fully up to date with coverage of the 2012 presidential campaign. Based on the popularity of the "Going to the Source" feature, which was introduced in the previous edition, additional "Going to the Source" selections are offered online in the eighth edition. Available in the following split options: THE ENDURING VISION, Eighth Edition Complete, International Edition, Volume 1: To 1877, International Edition, and Volume 2: Since 1865, International Edition.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2020 From the bestselling author of Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge comes the dramatic conclusion of how conservatism took control of American political power. Over two decades, Rick Perlstein has published three definitive works about the emerging dominance of conservatism in modern American politics. With the saga's final installment, he has delivered yet another stunning literary and historical achievement. In late 1976, Ronald Reagan was dismissed as a man without a political future: defeated in his nomination bid against a sitting president of his own party, blamed for President Gerald Ford's defeat, too old to make another run. His comeback was fueled by an extraordinary confluence: fundamentalist preachers and former segregationists reinventing themselves as militant crusaders against gay rights and feminism; business executives uniting against regulation in an era of economic decline; a cadre of secretive "New Right" organizers deploying state-of-the-art technology, bending political norms to the breaking point-and Reagan's own unbending optimism, his ability to convey unshakable confidence in America as the world's "shining city on a hill." Meanwhile, a civil war broke out in the Democratic party. When President Jimmy Carter called Americans to a new ethic of austerity, Senator Ted Kennedy reacted with horror, challenging him for reelection. Carter's Oval Office tenure was further imperiled by the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, near-catastrophe at a Pennsylvania nuclear plant, aviation accidents, serial killers on the loose, and endless gas lines. Backed by a reenergized conservative Republican base, Reagan ran on the campaign slogan "Make America Great Again"-and prevailed. Reaganland is the story of how that happened, tracing conservatives' cutthroat strategies to gain power and explaining why they endure four decades later.

The ideas of US Air Force Colonel John Boyd have transformed American military policy and practice. A first-rate fighter pilot and a self-taught scholar, he wrote the first manual on jet aerial combat; spearheaded the design of both of the Air Force's premier fighters, the F-15 and the F-16; and shaped the tactics that saved lives during the Vietnam War and the strategies that won the Gulf War. Many of America's best-known military and political leaders consulted Boyd on matters of technology, strategy, and theory.
In "The Mind of War," Grant T. Hammond offers the first complete portrait of John Boyd, his groundbreaking ideas, and his enduring legacy. Based on extensive interviews with Boyd and those who knew him as well as on a close analysis of Boyd's briefings, this intellectual biography brings the work of an extraordinary thinker to a broader public.

The relationship between the US and China, the world's two superpowers, is peculiarly volatile. It rests on a seismic fault-of cultural misunderstanding, historical grievance, and ideological incompatibility. No other nations are so quick to offend and be offended. Their militaries play a dangerous game of chicken, corporations steal intellectual property, intelligence satellites peer, and AI technicians plot. The capacity for either country to cross a fatal line grows daily. Kevin Rudd, a former Australian prime minister who has studied, lived in, and worked with China for more than forty years, is one of the very few people who can offer real insight into the mindsets of the leadership whose judgment will determine if a war will be fought. The Avoidable War demystifies the actions of both sides, explaining and translating them for the benefit of the other. Geopolitical disaster is still avoidable, but only if these two giants can find a way to coexist without betraying their core interests through what Rudd calls "managed strategic competition." Should they fail, down that path lies the possibility of a war that could rewrite the future of both countries, and the world.

Combining impartial analysis with reliable facts and figures, this fully revised and updated 21st edition provides up-to-date commentary on these vast North American nations. General Survey Essays by leading experts analyse topics of regional importance, including: - US-Canadian integration, immigration, and the treatment of Indigenous peoples in North America. Country Surveys Each country is dealt with in greater detail within its own section. Country chapters include: - a chronology of political events - essays covering key socio-political and economic themes, including: recent political developments; foreign policy; constitution; the economy; energy policy; agriculture; trade; health and social policy - additional essays examining timely subjects such as US-Chinese economic competition, religion in US politics and the US Judicial system - historical, political and economic surveys of each of the US states and Canadian provinces and territories - statistical surveys of economic and demographic indicators - comprehensive directory sections covering public affairs, the economy and society, which provide contact details and other useful information for the most significant institutions in the region.

The intimate, human memories regarding Charles M. Russell, his genius and eccentricities, which Frank Linderman set down shortly after the death of his good friend, constitute a miscellany of personal insights for which any of Russell's biographers ought to have given his eyeteeth. But in none of the increasingly frequent Russell commentaries, apparently, has use ever been made of these prime source materials.When Russell and Linderman met, it was to be expected a close friendship would result. Their interests, experiences, and natural inclinations were of the same cloth. They loved untrammeled people in virgin country; they had high regard for the old-time Indian and his mores; they held the encroachments upon the old West of civilization's less laudable aspects in mutual disdain; and, finally, Linderman with words and Russell with paint and clay were professional artists concerned in the re-creation of a beloved time fast slipping away. These recollections of their shared campfires, trails, conversations, and fun constitute the finest portrait extant of Charley Russell, the human being, pulsing with personality, quip, and many of his well-known tall tales.

The most important collection of essays on American Women's History This collection incorporates the most influential and groundbreaking scholarship in the area of American women's history, featuring twenty-three original essays on critical themes and topics. It assesses the past thirty years of scholarship, capturing the ways that women's historians confront issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. This second edition updates essays related to Indigenous women, slavery, the American Revolution, Civil War, the West, activism, labor, popular culture, civil rights, and feminism. It also includes a discussion of laws, capitalism, gender identity and transgender experience, welfare, reproductive politics, oral history, as well as an exploration of the perspectives of free Blacks and migrants and refugees. Spanning from the 15th through the 21st centuries, chapters show how historians of women, gender, and sexuality have challenged established chronologies and advanced new understandings of America's political, economic, intellectual and social history. This edition also features a new essay on the history of women's suffrage to coincide with the 100th anniversary of passage of the 19th Amendment, as well as a new article that carries issues of women, gender and sexuality into the 21st century. Includes twenty-three original essays by leading scholars in American women's, gender and sexuality history Highlights the most recent scholarship on the key debates and future directions of this popular and contemporary field Substantially updates the first edition with new authors and topics that represent the expanding fields of women, gender, and sexuality Engages issues of race, ethnicity, region, and class as they shape and are shaped by women's and gender history Covers the breadth of American Women's history, including Native women, colonial law and religion, slavery and freedom, women's activism, work and welfare, culture and capitalism, the state, feminism, digital and oral history, and more A Companion to American Women's History, Second Edition is an ideal book for advanced undergraduates and graduate students studying American/U.S. women's history, history of gender and sexuality, and African American women's history. It will also appeal to scholars of these areas at all levels, as well as public historians working in museums, archives, and historic sites.

Examining over a century of US intervention in Latin America, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin reveals how the region has long served as a laboratory for US foreign policy, providing generations of Washington policy makers with an opportunity to rehearse a broad range of diplomatic and military tactics - tactics that then were applied elsewhere in the world as the US became a global superpower. During the Great Depression, for instance, FDR's Good Neighbor policy taught the United States to use "soft power" effectively and provided a blueprint for its postwar "empire by invitation." In the 1980s, Reagan likewise turned to Latin America, but now to rehabilitate "hard power" after the debacle of Vietnam, putting the United States on the road to its current crisis: endless, forever wars. This completely revised edition includes new information on the US invasion of Panama, US interventions in Cuba, Guatemala, and Chile, Plan Colombia and the War on Drugs, the Obama administration's involvement in the 2009 coup in Honduras, and the current crisis at the US-Mexico border, caused by decades of misguided Washington policies. Most provocatively, Grandin argues that the origins of many of the current threats to American democracy - disinformation, permanent surveillance, political extremism and out-of-control militarism - were foreshadowed in the United States' Central American policy.

A COUNTERNARRATIVE This groundbreaking book uncovers how anti-Black racism has informed and perpetuated anti-literacy laws, policies, and customs from the colonial period to the present day. As a counternarrative of the history of Black literacy in the United States, the book's historical lens reveals the interlocking political and social structures that have repeatedly failed to support equity in literacy for Black students. Arlette Ingram Willis walks readers through the impact of anti-Black racism's impact on literacy education by identifying and documenting the unacknowledged history of Black literacy education, one that is inextricably bound up with a history of White supremacy. Willis analyzes, exposes, illuminates, and interrogates incontrovertible historical evidence of the social, political, and legal efforts to deny equal literacy access. The chapters cover an in-depth evolution of the role of White supremacy and the harm it causes in forestalling Black readers' progress; a critical examination of empirical research and underlying ideological assumptions that resulted in limiting literacy access; and a review of federal and state documents that restricted reading access for Black people. Willis interweaves historical vignettes throughout the text as antidotes to whitewashing the history of literacy among Black people in the United States and offers recommendations on ways forward to dismantle racist reading research and laws. By centering the narrative on the experiences of Black people in the United States, Willis shifts the conversation and provides an uncompromising focus on not only the historical impact of such laws and policies but also their connections to present-day laws and policies. A definitive history of the instructional and legal structures that have harmed generations of Black people, this text is essential for scholars, students, and policymakers in literacy education, reading research, history of education, and social justice education.

This book takes a new approach by synthesizing the work of scholars of military and Indigenous history to provide the first chronologically ordered, region-wide, and long-term narrative history of conflict in the Early American Northeast. War and Colonization in the Early American Northeast focuses on war and society, European colonization, and Indigenous peoples in New England from the pre-Columbian era to the mid-eighteenth century. It examines how the New English used warfare against Native Americans as a way to implement a colonial order. These conflicts shaped New English attitudes toward Native Americans, which further aided in the marginalization and the violent targeting of these communities. At the same time, this volume pays attention to the experiences of Indigenous peoples. It explores pre-Columbian Native American conflict, and studies how colonization altered the ways of warfare of Indigenous people. Native Americans contested New English efforts at colonization and used violent warfare strategies and raids to target their enemies - often quite successfully. However, in the long run, depending on time and geographic location, conflict and colonization led to dramatic and violent changes for Native Americans. This volume is an essential resource for academics, students, academic libraries and general readers interested in the history of New England, military, Native American, or U.S. history.

In "And Flights of Angels Sing Thee to Thy Rest", the essay which opens this compelling collection, Jerry Flemmons displays an uncommon sense of both history and fun. When it was announced that angels would adorn the facade of the magnificent hall to be built in Fort Worth for the performing arts, the columnist, intrigued by the incongruity of angels in Cowtown, demanded, "Where in the hell did those angels come from?" He finally solved the dilemma by deciding they were the fallen angels of Hell's Half Acre, "Irish Kate ... on the right, and Big Birdie ... on the left".

With strong affection for almost all things Texan, Flemmons writes of the ordinary with an extraordinary sophistication and cleverness. His Texas is sometimes a place of sadness, even tragedy, sometimes a place of high jinks and great jokes, but most often, it's a place of vanishing traditions and long-ago days. It's all here in this collection ... and it's Flemmons at his best.

He was a pallbearer the day they buried Lee Harvey Oswald in Rose Hill Cemetery in Fort Worth. There was no one around at the brief ceremony to carry the coffin, so newspapermen performed the chore. Thereafter Marguerite Oswald, or Mama Oswald as the reporters called her, telephoned Flemmons and others with "histrionic demands and telephone tirades and 'official' announcements on the progress of her 'case.'" Flemmon's essay, "Mama Oswald", is a compassionate and complex picture of this tormented and tragic woman.

He was there, too, when they found sniper Charles Whitman on the observation deck of the famed Tower at the University of Texas. He wrote of the slight breeze that blew that day, the play of light and shadow on the deck -- and onWhitman's body -- and the stunned reaction of those who found bodies on various levels of the Tower.

But Flemmons also tells lighter stories with ease, such as the one about the late Amon Carter commissioning a statue of Will Rogers on horseback, then keeping it hidden in planked boxes for eight years while World War II ran itself out. Carter couldn't have a proper unveiling with the war going on, so he waited. But those planks were an awful temptation to local boys.

It may be that Flemmons writes best of the small and common bits of Texas. There are essays on hunkering, that fundamental resting position for rural men, and the importance of front porches, the nostalgia of a good courthouse clock with a bell, the etiquette of the two-step, the vanishing tradition of the game "42", and the inadequacy of pork barbecue.

Once he found his own private Brigadoon, a small East Texas town with a Gothic courthouse in the center of a square faced with old wooden storefronts. Old men pitched horseshoes, played dominoes or sat quietly on the worn benches on the lawn around the courthouse. Children played on the lawn and begged hard candies from the man behind the grocery store counter. Flemmons ate lunch at the cafe and a dish of ice cream at the drugstore that still boasted a counter and stools. "To this day, I cannot remember the town's name, though I can recall everything about it. I have driven many miles in East Texas, searching for it, have found other towns with other courthouses and other old men, but never my town, my Brigadoon".

As the dense coastal fog rolls in to blanket the shoreline in gloomy silence, one thing becomes very clear. Oregon is a state in which ghosts roam. Not only here on the coast but in the lush green inland regions as well. Oregon is the ninth largest state in the US, and is one of contrasts from the fertile Willamette Valley with its hundreds of wineries to its rugged coastline; from its twenty-two feet tall Pioneer statue, known affectionately as Gold Man, sitting atop the state capital in Salem to its ghost towns, Oregon is a state of stark beauty, hauntings and history. Ghosts linger for any number of reasons. Those who've stayed on in Oregon range from millionaires who refuse to move from their mansions, lonely cemetery inhabitants, those attached to local theaters, saloons and hotels to ladies of the evening who made the wrong life and death decisions. Their reasons for staying put are as varied as there are rose bushes in the state.

The incredible story of the man and legend who has come to symbolize the continuing pursuit of justice for Blacks in the United States Through the 1980s, the mainstream press portrayed the Reverend Al Sharpton as a buffoon, a fake minister, a hustler, an opportunist, a demagogue, a race traitor, and an anti-Semite. Today, Sharpton occupies a throne that would have shocked the white newspaper reporters who covered him forty years ago. A mesmerizing story of astounding transformation, craftiness, and survival, King Al follows Reverend Sharpton's life trajectory, from his early life as a boy preacher to his present moment as the most popular Black American activist/minister/cable news host. In the 1980s, Rev. Al created controversies that would have doomed a lesser man to the dustbin of history. Among these controversies were his work with the FBI as the agency attempted to locate Black Liberation Army leader Assata Shakur; and his involvement in the 1987 Tawana Brawley episode. Regarding the Brawley matter, a white prosecutor sued Sharpton, successfully, for falsely accusing him of having raped the then-fifteen-year-old Brawley. It was the white press, in its glory days, that created the podium from which Sharpton became both famous and infamous. Those reporters would joke that the most dangerous place in New York was between Al Sharpton and a television camera. But it was those reporters who made Sharpton the media figure he is today. Today, as host of MSNBC's PoliticsNation news program, Sharpton has more news viewers than those reporters ever had readers. The Reverend Al's rise to respectability is a testament to an endurance and boldness steeped in Black American history. Born in Brooklyn to parents from the old slave-holding South, he transformed himself into one of the most respected and politically influential Blacks in the United States. In his in-depth coverage, author Ron Howell tells the stories of Sharpton's ascendance to the throne. He tells us about the glory years of American newspapers, when Sharpton began his rise. And he tells us about the politicians who intersected with Sharpton as he climbed the ladder. King Al is an engaging read about the late-twentieth-century history of New York City politics and race relations, as well as about the remarkable staying power of the colorful, politically skillful, and enigmatic Sharpton.

When the networks called the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden on Saturday, November 7, 2020, people from coast to coast exhaled--and danced in the streets. This quick-turnaround volume, a collection of 38 personal essays from writers all over the country--"many of America's most thoughtful voices," as Jon Meacham puts it--captures the week Trump was voted out, a unique juncture in American life, and helps point toward a way forward to a nation less divided. An eclectic lineup of contributors--from Rosanna Arquette, Susan Bro and General Wesley Clark to Keith Olbermann, Stewart O'Nan and Anthony Scaramucci--puts a year of transition into perspective, and summons the anxieties and hopes so many have for better times ahead. As award-winning columnist Mary C. Curtis writes in the lead essay, "Saying you're not interested in politics is dangerous because, like it or not, politics is interested in you." Novelist Christopher Buckley, a former speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush, laments, "The Republican Senate, with one exception, has become a stay of ovine, lickspittle quislings, degenerate descendants of such giants as Everett Dirksen, Barry Goldwater, Howard Baker and John McCain." Nero Award-winning mystery novelist Stephen Mack Jones writes, to Donald Trump, "Remember: You live in my house. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is my house. My ancestors built it at a cost of blood, soul and labor. I pay my taxes every year to feed you, clothe you and your family and staff and fly you around the country and the world in my tricked-out private jet. If you violate any aspect of your four-year lease--any aspect--Lord Jesus so help me, I will do everything in my power to kick yo narrow ass to the curb." As Publisher Steve Kettmann writes in the Introduction: "The hope is that in putting out these glimpses so quickly, giving them an immediacy unusual in book publishing, we can help in the mourning for all that has been lost, help in the healing (of ourselves and of our country), and help in the pained effort, like moving limbs that have gone numb from inactivity, to give new life to our democracy. We stared into the abyss, tottered on the edge, and a record-setting surge of voting and activism delivered us from the very real threat of plunging into autocracy."

This study engages with the emerging field of energy humanities to provide close readings of several early American oriental-observer tales. The popular genre of orientalism offered Americans a means to critique new ideas of identity, history, and nationality accompanying protoindustrialization and a growing consumerism. The tales thus express a complex self-reflection during a time when America's exploitation of its energy resources and its engagement in a Franco-British world-system was transforming the daily life of its citizens. The genre of the oriental observer, this study argues, offers intriguing glimpses of a nation becoming strange in the eyes of its own inhabitants.

This book focuses on the era during which the cause of tuberculosis had been identified, and public health officials were seeking to prevent it, but scientists had not yet found a cure. By examining tuberculosis comparatively in two Atlantic port cities, Buenos Aires and Philadelphia, it explores the medical, political and economic settings in which patients, physicians and urban officials lived and worked. Reber discusses the causes of tuberculosis, treatments and public health efforts to stop contagion, and how factors such as gender, age, class, nationality, beliefs and previous experiences shaped patient responses, and often defined the type of treatment.

This collection of short, action-filled stories of the Old West's most egregiously bad family-based gangs caught in the act of mayhem, distraction, murder, and highway robbery, includes famous names like the James brothers and lesser known families just as the Deautremonts, the Newtons, and many more. The book will include archival illustrations and photographs of the shady characters and the scenes of their crimes.

As one of America's most haunted cities, Savannah, Georgia, has a long list of stories of the supernatural, such as the story of the first two people hanged in colonial Savannah for the murder of their abusive master. Or James Stark, a tempestuous planter, and Dr. Philip Minis, who settled their dispute with a duel and still hang around the old building at Moon River Brewing Co. Or the terrifying "boy-giant," Rene Rhondolia, who preys on young girls and animals. Join authors Michael Harris and Linda Sickler as they navigate the chilling world of those who refuse to leave their Savannah homes.

After describing NAFTA as 'the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere', Donald Trump's election seemed to represent the final nail in the coffin for North American economic integration. Following a decade of stagnation, however, Trump's victory presents a timely opportunity to reconsider North American integration and evaluate NAFTA's democratic track record in Mexico. In this book, Pablo Calderon Martinez presents a detailed analysis of NAFTA's influence as a political tool for democracy in Mexico. Extending beyond a mere economic or social exploration of the consequences of NAFTA, Calderon Martinez uses a three-tiered analysis based on causality mechanisms to explain how the interactions between internationalisation and democratisation unfolded in Mexico. Calderon Martinez's analysis demonstrates that Mexico's internationalisation project under the framework of NAFTA gave shape to, if not made, Mexico's democratisation process. An original and timely resource for scholars and students interested in understanding how - in cases like Mexico where transitions to democracy are characterised by a finely poised balance of power - small influences from abroad can make significant long-lasting differences domestically.

The Needs of Others is set in the UN in 1994, where diplomats learn of violence in Rwanda. Representing UN ambassadors, human rights organisations, journalists and public opinion leaders, students wrestle with difficult questions based on an unsteady trickle of information: Should the UN peacekeeping mission be withdrawn or strengthened? Is the fighting in Rwanda a civil war or something else? Does the UN have an obligation to intervene?