Kategoria BISAC: History >> United States - State & Local - West (AK, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT, NV, UT, WY)

Americans living in virgin wilderness in the first half of the nineteenth century became convinced that the kingdom of God prophesied in the book of Isaiah had finally come to pass. In celebration of the dawning of a new age they gathered in communal societies, built villages, and sought to live holy lives. Far less well-known than the Civil War, the idealism of this era is a fascinating and vital part of American history.

In the 1840s one of these communities sent missionaries to England. A young man named Jesse Griffen had his heart inflamed with the promise of a place in America...

This practical, down-to-earth guide for surface collectors of arrowheads and stone artifacts is designed especially for amateur archaeologists and people interested in learning how to study and collect artifacts safely and responsibly. The author reveals invaluable tips on: where to look for artifacts; how to identify artifacts; where surface collecting is permissible; starting and caring for your own collection. With more than fifty new photographs and illustrations of common and rare artifacts, this book is the perfect addition to libraries of amateur archaeologists thirsty for knowledge...

In October of 1887, a young woman named Hattie Woolsteen was accused of murdering her married lover, Los Angeles dentist Charles Harlan. The subsequent trial captivated the public as few incidents had done before. The idea of a female murderer was particularly disturbing in 19th-century America, and the public quickly labeled her a fiend and a "she-devil." But despite the overwhelming evidence against the accused, Hattie Woolsteen was not only acquitted of the charge, but emerged as the victim in this sordid drama. As the public grappled with the details of Hattie's alleged crime, she...

Giant redwoods are American icons, paragons of grandeur, exceptionalism, and endurance. They are also symbols of conflict and negotiation, remnants of environmental battles over the limits of industrialization, profiteering, and globalization.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, logging operations have eaten away at the redwood forest, particularly areas covered by ancient giant redwoods. Today, such trees occupy a mere 120,000 acres. Their existence is testimony to the efforts of activists to rescue some of these giants from destruction. Very few conservation battles have...

In her first book, Blonde Indian, Ernestine Hayes powerfully recounted the story of returning to Juneau and to her Tlingit home after many years of wandering. The Tao of Raven takes up the next and, in some ways, less explored question: once the exile returns, then what?

Using the story of Raven and the Box of Daylight (and relating it to Sun Tzu's equally timeless Art of War) to deepen her narration and reflection, Hayes expresses an ongoing frustration and anger at the obstacles and prejudices still facing Alaska Natives in their own land, but also recounts her own...

During the 1885 to 1924 immigration period of plantation laborers from Japan to Hawaii, more than 200,000 Japanese, mostly single men, made the long journey by ship to the Hawaiian Islands. As it became apparent that they would never return to Japan, many of the men sent for brides to join them in their adopted home. More than 20,000 of these picture brides immigrated from Japan and Okinawa to Hawaii to marry husbands whom they knew only through photographs exchanged between them or their families.

Based on Barbara Kawakami's first-hand interviews with sixteen of these women, Picture...

How does a man serving in the Imperial Japanese Army feel when he suddenly sees his brother in the uniform of the enemy United States? How does a Japanese mother, surrounded by barbed wire in an American internment camp for enemy aliens, feel when her only son writes: I am now an American soldier. I must fight and, if necessary, die for my country? How does a Hawaii-born youth feel as he lies near death in Hiroshima, a victim of history's first nuclear attack, launched by the United States? Or a twelve-year-old girl on a sugar plantation, whose ailing father returned to the place of his...

The Grapes of Wrath brought national attention to the condition of California's migrant farmworkers in the 1930s. Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers' grape and lettuce boycotts captured the imagination of the United States in the 1960s and '70s. Yet today, the stories of the more than 800,000 men, women, and children working in California's fields--one third of the nation's agricultural work force--are rarely heard, despite the persistence of wage theft, dangerous working conditions, and...