By Robert Morgan
From Thomas Jefferson’s beginning in 1743 to the California Gold rush in 1849, America’s occur future involves existence in Robert Morgan’s expert palms. Jefferson, a naturalist and visionary, dreamed that the U.S. may stretch around the continent from ocean to ocean. The account of ways that dream grew to become truth unfolds within the tales of Jefferson and 9 different americans whose adventurous spirits and lust for land driven the westward limitations: Andrew Jackson, John “Johnny Appleseed” Chapman, David Crockett, Sam Houston, James okay. Polk, Winfield Scott, equipment Carson, Nicholas Trist, and John Quincy Adams. Their tenacity was once matched in basic terms by way of that in their enemies—the Mexican military below Santa Anna on the Alamo, the Comanche and Apache Indians, and the forbidding geography itself.
Known additionally for his strong fiction (Gap Creek, The Truest Pleasure, Brave Enemies), Morgan makes use of his ability at characterization to provide existence to the personalities of those ten american citizens with no whom the U.S. may perhaps good have ended on the Arkansas border. Their stories—and these of the anonymous millions who risked their lives to choose the frontier, displacing millions of local Americans—form a rare bankruptcy in American background that led on to the cataclysm of the Civil War.
With illustrations, photos, maps, conflict plans, appendixes, notes, and time traces, Lions of the West is a richly authoritative biography of the USA as compelling as a grand novel.
Read Online or Download Lions of the West PDF
Similar united states of america books
The Farfarers: Before the Norse
The Farfarers: earlier than the Norse (2000) is a booklet by way of Farley Mowat that units out a idea approximately pre-Columbian trans-oceanic touch. Mowat's thesis is that even earlier than the Vikings, North the US used to be chanced on and settled by means of Europeans originating from Orkney who reached Canada after a generation-spanning migration that used Iceland and Greenland as 'stepping stones'.
Ghostly Ruins: America's Forgotten Architecture
We've all obvious them yet could have been too scared to go into: the home at the hill with its boarded-up home windows; the darkened manufacturing unit at the outskirts of city; the previous enjoyment park with its rickety skeleton of a rollercoaster. those are the ruins of the USA, choked with the echoes of the voices and footfalls of our grandparents, or their mom and dad, or our personal formative years.
The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World
The the world over popular theorist contends that the sunlight is atmosphere at the American empire
“Today, the U.S. is a superpower that lacks actual energy, a global chief not anyone follows and few appreciate, and a country drifting dangerously amidst an international chaos it can't keep an eye on. ” —from The Decline of yankee Power
The usa in decline? Its admirers and detractors alike declare the other: that the USA is now ready of remarkable international supremacy. yet actually, Immanuel Wallerstein argues, a extra nuanced assessment of contemporary historical past unearths that the US has been fading as an international energy because the finish of the Vietnam warfare, and its reaction to the terrorist assaults of September eleven seems bound to hasten that decline. during this provocative assortment, the visionary originator of world-systems research and the main cutting edge social scientist of his new release turns a practiced analytical eye to the turbulent beginnings of the twenty first century. relating globalization, Islam, racism, democracy, intellectuals, and the kingdom of the Left, Wallerstein upends traditional knowledge to supply a clear-eyed—and troubling—assessment of the crumbling foreign order.
Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy
“Fluent, well-timed, provocative. . . . packed with gritty, sensible, particular suggestion on international coverage ends and capacity. . . . Gelb’s plea for higher strategic pondering is de facto correct and valuable. ” — the hot York occasions booklet Review
“Few american citizens be aware of the interior global of yankee overseas policy—its feuds, follies, and fashions—as good as Leslie H. Gelb. . . . energy ideas builds on that life of adventure with strength and is a witty and acerbic primer. ” — the recent York Times
Power ideas is the provocative account of ways to contemplate and use America’s strength on this planet, from Pulitzer Prize winner Leslie H. Gelb, one of many nation’s top international coverage minds and practitioners.
Additional resources for Lions of the West
Sample text
The prospect of a permanent French base on this vulnerable alley of water threatened not only the treasure fleet but Spain’s dominance in Europe. Yet for the staunchly Catholic Spanish crown, driving the French heretics from La Florida was not just a geopolitical necessity but a sacred cause—one that would be undertaken, like those earlier raids by the cutthroat dissenter Jacques de Sores, amid a mood of homicidal reli gious fervor. the clash nearly came at once. If the winds had been friendly, Man rique de Rojas might have made it to the mouth of the Saint Johns just as the French were arriving.
So devastated was Cuba’s first capital that it never fully recov ered and was soon overshadowed in importance by Havana. ” But at least Le Clerc, who may have been Catholic himself, spared the local church. With the arrival of Jacques de Sores in Cuba the following year, Europe’s religious carnage began to spread to the New World. Sores saw himself as a Protestant avenger, a scourge against the false church. So deep was his hatred of Catholics that decades later, when he captured a Portuguese ship en route to Brazil with forty Jesuit mission aries on board, he ordered them thrown into the sea dead or alive, along with their holy images, books, and relics.
It is true that the historian and naturalist Gonzálo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés left an extensive, if crude, pictorial record of his travels in the New World, but even he conceded that he lacked artistic talent and training. And while Spanish authorities regularly asked explorers to bring back information on native 12 PA I N T E R I N A S AVA G E L A N D customs, “no request seems to have been made for drawings,” observed the historians Paul Hulton and David Beers Quinn. The first important European painter in Mexico, Simón Pereyns, did not arrive in the New World until two years after Le Moyne, and, once there, he painted the same things that he would have painted in Spain: religious scenes and portraits of his countrymen.