Battle For The Southern Frontier

This comprehensive book is the first to chronicle both wars and document the sites on which they were fought. It sheds light on how the wars led to the forced removal of Native Americans from the region, secured the Gulf South against European powers, facilitated increased migration into the area, furthered the development of slave-based agriculture and launched the career of Andrew Jackson.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the British embarked on a concerted series of campaigns in South Africa. Within three years they waged five wars against African states with the intent of destroying their military might and political independence and unifying southern Africa under imperial control. This is the first work to tell the story of this cluster of conflicts as a single whole and to narrate the experiences of the militarily outmatched African societies. Deftly fusing the widely differing European and African perspectives on events, John Laband details the fateful decisions of individual leaders and generals and explores why many Africans chose to join the British and colonial forces. The Xhosa, Zulu, and other African military cultures are brought to vivid life, showing how varying notions of warrior honor and manliness influenced the outcomes for African fighting men and their societies.

Most histories of the Civil War era portray the struggle over slavery as a conflict that exclusively pitted North against South, free labor against slave labor, and black against white. In Freedom's Frontier, Stacey L. Smith examines the battle over slavery as it unfolded on the multiracial Pacific Coast. Despite its antislavery constitution, California was home to a dizzying array of bound and semibound labor systems: African American slavery, American Indian indenture, Latino and Chinese contract labor, and a brutal sex traffic in bound Indian and Chinese women. Using untapped legislative and court records, Smith reconstructs the lives of California's unfree workers and documents the political and legal struggles over their destiny as the nation moved through the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. Smith reveals that the state's anti-Chinese movement, forged in its struggle over unfree labor, reached eastward to transform federal Reconstruction policy and national race relations for decades to come. Throughout, she illuminates the startling ways in which the contest over slavery's fate included a western struggle that encompassed diverse labor systems and workers not easily classified as free or slave, black or white.

This 2005 book explores the evolution of Americans' first way of war, to show how war waged against Indian noncombatant population and agricultural resources became the method early Americans employed and, ultimately, defined their military heritage. The sanguinary story of the American conquest of the Indian peoples east of the Mississippi River helps demonstrate how early Americans embraced warfare shaped by extravagant violence and focused on conquest. Grenier provides a major revision in understanding the place of warfare directed on noncombatants in the American military tradition, and his conclusions are relevant to understand US 'special operations' in the War on Terror.

A first reference that provides insights into both sides of Indian-white relations. Volume I covers events in the Southeastern Woodlands. Subsequent volumes will cover the Northeastern Woodlands, the Great Plains, and the Far West. Heard approaches h

The vicious war on the frontier significantly altered the course of the Revolution. Regular troops, volunteers, and Indians clashed in large-scale campaigns. Bloody fights for land, home, and family. Although the American Revolution is commonly associated with specific locations such as the heights above Boston or the frozen Delaware River, important events took place in the wooded, mountainous lands of the frontier.

First published in 1569, La Araucana, an epic poem written by the Spanish nobleman Alonso de Ercilla, valorizes the Spanish conquest of Chile in the sixteenth century. Nearly a half-century later in 1610, Gaspar de Villagrá, Mexican-born captain under Juan de Oñate in New Mexico, published Historia de la Nueva México, a historical epic about the Spanish subjugation of the indigenous peoples of New Mexico. In Epics of Empire and Frontier—a deft cultural, ethnohistorical reading of these two colonial epics, both of which loom large in the canon of Spanish literature—Celia López-Chávez reveals new ways of thinking about the themes of empire and frontier. Employing historical and literary analysis that goes from the global to the regional, and from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, López-Chávez considers Ercilla and Villagrá not only as writers but as citizens and subjects of the powerful Spanish empire. Although frontiers of conquest have always been central to the regional histories of the Americas, this is the first work to approach the subject through epic poetry and the main events in the poets’ lives. López-Chávez also investigates the geographical spaces and landmarks where the conquests of Chile and New Mexico took place, the natural landscape of each area as both the Spanish and the natives saw it, and the characteristics of the expeditions in both regions, with special attention to the violence of the invasions. In her discussion of law, geography, and frontier, López-Chávez carries the poems’ firsthand testimony on the political, cultural, and social resistance of indigenous people into present-day debates about regional and national identity. An interdisciplinary, comparative postcolonial interpretation of the history found in two poetic narratives of conquest, Epics of Empire and Frontier brings fresh understanding to the role that poetry plays in regional and national memory and culture.

The Creek War grew out of a civil war that pitted Creek Indians striving to maintain their traditional culture, called Red Sticks, against those Creeks who sought to assimilate with United States society.