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

California would be a different place today without the imprint of Spanish culture and the legacy of Indian civilization. The colonial Spanish missions that dot the coast and foothills between Sonoma and San Diego are relics of a past that transformed California's landscape and its people.

In a spare and accessible style, Colonial Rosary looks at the complexity of California's Indian civilization and the social effects of missionary control. While oppressive institutions lasted in California for almost eighty years under the tight reins of royal Spain, the Catholic...

In the spring of 1931, in a rugged desert canyon on the Arizona-Nevada border, an army of workmen began one of the most difficult and daring building projects ever undertaken--the construction of Hoover Dam. Through the worst years of the Great Depression as many as five thousand laborers toiled twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to erect the huge structure that would harness the Colorado River and transform the American West.

Construction of the giant dam was a triumph of human ingenuity, yet the full story of this monumental endeavor has never been told. Now, in an...

The world of the West has been from the beginning a man's world, but there are homes and wives and children there, too. And although the time of water hauled in barrels and of homemade candles is long past, the ranch wife of today must be prepared to deal with housekeeping, shopping, and personal problems in wholly original ways as the need arises. For ranches are usually far from town and neighbors are scattered, so that good humor and a good sense of humor, as well as the more conventional virtues of courage and fortitude, must be possessed by the ranch woman.

For more than...

Although he did not travel farther inland than the slopes of the Appalachians, Thomas Jefferson must take his place alongside Zebulon Pike, Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, and Lewis and Clark--the men who blazed the great western trails. Donald Jackson cogently recounts Jefferson s fundamental role in promoting and shaping the exploration, settlement, and development of the Trans-Mississippi West.

For more than five hundred years, explorers roamed the wilderness of North America, some in search of a route to the East or fabled cities of gold, others seeking the glossy pelts of the beaver or souls to convert. From the early voyages of Norse seafarers to the opening of the American, Canadian, and Alaskan frontiers and the grueling twentieth-century race to the North Pole, this great adventure is captured as never before in the lavishly illustrated Atlas of North American Exploration.

Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian William H. Goetzmann and exploration historian Glyndwr...

So small it had only one bank, so quiet no citizens carried guns. Hard-working, peaceful Northfield, Minnesota, was an orderly yet busy mill-town in the heart of prosperous farm country. On a serene autumn Tuesday in 1876, local shopkeepers, farmers, and citizenry went about their normal routines, little realizing that the infamous and deadly James-Younger gang had designs on tiny Northfield.

The experienced robbers planned to target the single bank, which held the hard-earned money of the townsfolk. Jesse and Frank James and the Younger brothers had never experienced defeat.

During a...

Do law and legal procedures exist only so long as there is an official authority to enforce them? Or do we have an unspoken sense of law and ethics?

To answer these questions, John Phillip Reid s Contested Empire explores the implicit notions of law shared by American and British fur traders in the Snake River country of Idaho and surrounding areas in the early nineteenth century. Both the United States and Great Britain had claimed this region, and passions were intense. Focusing mainly on Canadian explorer and trader Peter Skene Ogden, Reid finds that both side largely avoided violence...

The Texas Sheriff takes a fresh, colorful, and insightful look at Texas law enforcement during the decades before 1960. In the first half of the twentieth century, rural Texas was a strange, often violent, and complicated place. Nineteenth-century lifestyles persisted, blood relationships made a difference, and racial apartheid was still rigidly enforced.

Citizens expected their county sheriff to uphold local customs as well as state laws. He had to help constituents with their personal problems, which often had little or nothing to do with law enforcement. The rural...

Among historians of Utah and the American West, few names have greater resonance than Bernard DeVoto, Dale Morgan, Juanita Brooks, Wallace Stegner, and Fawn Brodie. Each of these writers made enduring contributions not only to our knowledge of the American West but also to our view of the region and its history. In many ways their writing set the standard for scholarship and interpretation, and their influence is still felt today.

Yet they were not flawless. As Gary Topping explains in this, the first comprehensive appraisal of their work, each had serious shortcomings. DeVoto and...

From 1846 to 1857 Mormons played a crucial role in shaping events in California and the West. They were the first American settlers of San Francisco, and without them, John Sutter might not have built his sawmill and thus discovered gold in 1848.

In Gold Rush Saints, Kenneth N. Owens combines narrative history and documentary accounts to reveal a hidden wealth of California and Mormon history. The first-person accounts of pioneer Mormons, both men and women, offer new perspectives on myths and realities of gold rush California.

Our sense of place is permeated by ghosts from the past. In "GhostWest," Ann Ronald takes the reader to historical sites where something once happened. Using the metaphor of hauntings, she reflects on how western history, literature, and lore continue to shape our visceral impressions of these sites.

In chapters both lyrical and thoughtful, passionate and humorous, "GhostWest" covers sites in seventeen western states, including the Little Bighorn Battlefield in Montana, Willa Cather's Nebraska prairies, and the Murrah Building bombing site in Oklahoma. Through these settings and their...

This is not your grandfather's history of Texas. Portraying nineteenth-century Texas as a cauldron of racist violence, Gary Clayton Anderson shows that the ethnic warfare dominating the Texas frontier can best be described as ethnic cleansing.

The Conquest of Texas is the story of the struggle between Anglos and Indians for land. Anderson tells how Scotch-Irish settlers clashed with farming tribes and then challenged the Comanches and Kiowas for their hunting grounds. Next, the decade-long conflict with Mexico merged with war against Indians. For fifty years Texas remained...