The American National State And The Early West

This book challenges the widely held myth that the American national state was weak in the early days of the republic. William H. Bergmann reveals how the federal government used its fiscal and military powers, as well as bureaucratic authority, to enhance land acquisitions, promote infrastructure development and facilitate commerce and communication in the early trans-Appalachian West. Energetic federal state-building efforts prior to 1815 grew from national state security interests as Native Americans and British imperial designs threatened to unravel the republic. White Westerners and Western state governments partnered with the federal government to encourage commercial growth and emigration, to transform the borderland into a bordered land. Taking a regional approach, this work synthesizes the literatures of social history, political science and economic history to provide a new narrative of American expansionism, one that takes into account the unique historical circumstances in the Ohio Valley and the southern Great Lakes.

Big Bend This compact handbook, which is a part of the official National Park Handbook series is divided into 3 sections. Part 1 provides a brief introduction and history of Big Bend Big Bend National Park, including such major attractions a the Rio Grande River, the Chihuahuan Desert, and the Chisos Mountains; part 2 concentrates on the area's natural beauty and history; and part 3 presents an authoritative travel guide and reference materials.

Familiar figures - missionaries, explorers, trappers, traders, prospectors, gunfighters, cowboys, and Indians - appear in these pages. So do renowned individuals such as Daniel Boone, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and John Wayne. But their stories contribute to a history of the American West that is longer, larger, and more complicated than we were once told.

BOOK ONE of the CODE OF THE WEST seriesStaying alive in the Old West requires three things: a fast horse, a quick hand, and enough smarts to know when to get out of town.Pepper Paige is sick of the fighting and emptiness that surround her as a dance-hall girl. And tired of fearing Jordan Beckett, a violent patron who has turned his attentions on her. Pepper gets her chance to escape, assuming a stranger's identity . . . and that woman's fiance out west. Little does she know, that man's been killed by Indians. Instead, a prison escapee named Tap Andrews is passing himself off as the rancher.What happens when the pair meet? And who will be left standing when Beckett tracks down Pepper, only to find a tough young cowboy in his way?FOR MORE STEPHEN BLY BOOKS, AND OTHER AWARD-WINNING WESTERN WRITERS, GO TO http://dustytrailbooks.com/

This edited volume takes stories from the "modern West" of the late twentieth century and carefully pulls them toward the present--explicitly tracing continuity with and unexpected divergence from trajectories established in the 1980s and 1990s.

An illuminating history of North America's eleven rival cultural regions that explodes the red state-blue state myth. North America was settled by people with distinct religious, political, and ethnographic characteristics, creating regional cultures that have been at odds with one another ever since. Subsequent immigrants didn't confront or assimilate into an “American” or “Canadian” culture, but rather into one of the eleven distinct regional ones that spread over the continent each staking out mutually exclusive territory. In American Nations, Colin Woodard leads us on a journey through the history of our fractured continent, and the rivalries and alliances between its component nations, which conform to neither state nor international boundaries. He illustrates and explains why “American” values vary sharply from one region to another. Woodard (author of American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good) reveals how intranational differences have played a pivotal role at every point in the continent's history, from the American Revolution and the Civil War to the tumultuous sixties and the "blue county/red county" maps of recent presidential elections. American Nations is a revolutionary and revelatory take on America's myriad identities and how the conflicts between them have shaped our past and are molding our future.

A provocative new book that shows us why we must put American history firmly in a global context--from 1492 to today Americans like to tell their country's story as if the United States were naturally autonomous and self-sufficient, with characters, ideas, and situations unique to itself. Thomas Bender asks us to rethink this "exceptionalism" and to reconsider the conventional narrative. He proposes that America has grappled with circumstances, doctrines, new developments, and events that other nations, too, have faced, and that we can only benefit from recognizing this. Bender's exciting argument begins with the discovery of the Americas at a time when peoples everywhere first felt the transforming effects of oceanic travel and trade. He then reconsiders our founding Revolution, occurring in an age of rebellion on many continents; the Civil War, happening when many countries were redefining their core beliefs about the nature of freedom and the meaning of nationhood; and the later imperialism that pitted the United States against Germany, Spain, France, and England. Industrialism and urbanization, laissez-faire economics, capitalism and socialism, and new technologies are other factors that Bender views in the light of global developments. A Nation Among Nations is a passionate, persuasive book that makes clear what damage is done when we let the old view of America alone in the world falsify our history. Bender boldly challenges us to think beyond our borders.

To most people living in the West, the Louisiana Purchase made little difference: the United States was just another imperial overlord to be assessed and manipulated. This was not, as Empires, Nations, and Families makes clear, virgin wilderness discovered by virtuous Anglo entrepreneurs. Rather, the United States was a newcomer in a place already complicated by vying empires. This book documents the broad family associations that crossed national and ethnic lines and that, along with the river systems of the trans-Mississippi West, formed the basis for a global trade in furs that had operated for hundreds of years before the land became part of the United States. ø Empires, Nations, and Families shows how the world of river and maritime trade effectively shifted political power away from military and diplomatic circles into the hands of local people. Tracing family stories from the Canadian North to the Spanish and Mexican borderlands and from the Pacific Coast to the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, Anne F. Hyde?s narrative moves from the earliest years of the Indian trade to the Mexican War and the gold rush era. Her work reveals how, in the 1850s, immigrants to these newest regions of the United States violently wrested control from Native and other powers, and how conquest and competing demands for land and resources brought about a volatile frontier culture?not at all the peace and prosperity that the new power had promised.