The Mississippi Valley Historical Review


Book Description

Includes articles and reviews covering all aspects of American history. Formerly the Mississippi Valley Historical Review,




Abraham Lincoln, the War Years


Book Description




Nursing History Review, Volume 4


Book Description

The official journal of the American Association for the History of Nursing




From Furs to Farms


Book Description

This original study tells the story of the Illinois Country, a collection of French villages that straddled the Mississippi River for nearly a century before it was divided by the treaties that ended the Seven Years' War in the early 1760s. Spain acquired the territory on the west side of the river and Great Britain the territory on the east. After the 1783 Treaty of Paris and the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the entire region was controlled by the United States, and the white inhabitants were transformed from subjects to citizens. By 1825, Indian claims to the land that had become the states of Illinois and Missouri were nearly all extinguished, and most of the Indians had moved west. John Reda focuses on the people behind the Illinois Country's transformation from a society based on the fur trade between Europeans, Indians, and mixed-race (métis) peoples to one based on the commodification of land and the development of commercial agriculture. Many of these people were white and became active participants in the development of local, state, and federal governmental institutions. But many were Indian or métis people who lost both their lands and livelihoods, or black people who arrived—and remained—in bondage. In From Furs to Farms, Reda rewrites early national American history to include the specific people and places that make the period far more complex and compelling than what is depicted in the standard narrative. This fascinating work will interest historians, students, and general readers of US history and Midwestern studies.




Jacksonland


Book Description

“The story of the Cherokee removal has been told many times, but never before has a single book given us such a sense of how it happened and what it meant, not only for Indians, but also for the future and soul of America.” —The Washington Post Five decades after the Revolutionary War, the United States approached a constitutional crisis. At its center stood two former military comrades locked in a struggle that tested the boundaries of our fledgling democracy. One man we recognize: Andrew Jackson—war hero, populist, and exemplar of the expanding South—whose first major initiative as president instigated the massive expulsion of Native Americans known as the Trail of Tears. The other is a half-forgotten figure: John Ross—a mixed-race Cherokee politician and diplomat—who used the United States’ own legal system and democratic ideals to oppose Jackson. Representing one of the Five Civilized Tribes who had adopted the ways of white settlers, Ross championed the tribes’ cause all the way to the Supreme Court, gaining allies like Senator Henry Clay, Chief Justice John Marshall, and even Davy Crockett. Ross and his allies made their case in the media, committed civil disobedience, and benefited from the first mass political action by American women. Their struggle contained ominous overtures of later events like the Civil War and defined the political culture for much that followed. Jacksonland is the work of renowned journalist Steve Inskeep, cohost of NPR’s Morning Edition, who offers a heart-stopping narrative masterpiece, a tragedy of American history that feels ripped from the headlines in its immediacy, drama, and relevance to our lives. Jacksonland is the story of America at a moment of transition, when the fate of states and nations was decided by the actions of two heroic yet tragically opposed men.




The Mississippi Valley Historical Review


Book Description

Includes articles and reviews covering all aspects of American history. Formerly the Mississippi Valley Historical Review,




River of History


Book Description




Age of Betrayal


Book Description

Age of Betrayal is a brilliant reconsideration of America's first Gilded Age, when war-born dreams of freedom and democracy died of their impossibility. Focusing on the alliance between government and railroads forged by bribes and campaign contributions, Jack Beatty details the corruption of American political culture that, in the words of Rutherford B. Hayes, transformed “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people” into “a government by the corporations, of the corporations, and for the corporations.” A passionate, gripping, scandalous and sorrowing history of the triumph of wealth over commonwealth.




Illinois in the War of 1812


Book Description

Russell P. Strange "Book of the Year" Award from the Illinois State Historical Society, 2012. On the eve of the War of 1812, the Illinois Territory was a new land of bright promise. Split off from Indiana Territory in 1809, the new territory ran from the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers north to the U.S. border with Canada, embracing the current states of Illinois, Wisconsin, and a part of Michigan. The extreme southern part of the region was rich in timber, but the dominant feature of the landscape was the vast tall grass prairie that stretched without major interruption from Lake Michigan for more than three hundred miles to the south. The territory was largely inhabited by Indians: Sauk, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, and others. By 1812, however, pioneer farmers had gathered in the wooded fringes around prime agricultural land, looking out over the prairies with longing and trepidation. Six years later, a populous Illinois was confident enough to seek and receive admission as a state in the Union. What had intervened was the War of 1812, in which white settlers faced both Indians resistant to their encroachments and British forces poised to seize control of the upper Mississippi and Great Lakes. The war ultimately broke the power and morale of the Indian tribes and deprived them of the support of their ally, Great Britain. Sometimes led by skillful tacticians, at other times by blundering looters who got lost in the tall grass, the combatants showed each other little mercy. Until and even after the war was concluded by the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, there were massacres by both sides, laying the groundwork for later betrayal of friendly and hostile tribes alike and for ultimate expulsion of the Indians from the new state of Illinois. In this engrossing new history, published upon the war's bicentennial, Gillum Ferguson underlines the crucial importance of the War of 1812 in the development of Illinois as a state. The history of Illinois in the War of 1812 has never before been told with so much attention to the personalities who fought it, the events that defined it, and its lasting consequences. Endorsed by the Illinois Society of the War of 1812 and the Illinois War of 1812 Bicentennial Commission.




Stephen E. Ambrose Opening of the West E-Book Boxed Set


Book Description

This ebook box set includes Undaunted Courage and Nothing Like It in the World by Stephen E. Ambrose, focusing on the ingenuity and the hardships that shaped the American West. Undaunted Courage: This #1 New York Times bestseller gives a sweeping account of the most momentous expedition in American history. Ambrose follows the Lewis and Clark Expedition from Thomas Jefferson's hope of finding a waterway to the Pacific, through the heart-stopping moments of the actual trip, to Lewis's lonely demise on the Natchez Trace. Along the way, Ambrose shows us the American West as Lewis saw it—wild, awesome, and pristinely beautiful. Nothing Like It in the World: A riveting account of an unprecedented feat of engineering, vision, and courage—this is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad. The US government pitted two companies—the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads—against each other in a race for funding, encouraging speed over caution, and their race brilliantly comes to life in Ambrose’s telling of the investors who risked their businesses and money; the enlightened politicians who understood its importance; the engineers and surveyors who risked, and sometimes lost, their lives; and the Irish and Chinese immigrants, the defeated Confederate soldiers, and all the laborers who did the backbreaking and dangerous work on the tracks.