With its dignified courthouse set among shade trees and lawns dotted with monuments to prominent citizens and fallen veterans, the courthouse square remains the civic center in a majority of the county seats of Texas. Yet the squares themselves vary in form and layout, reflecting the different town-planning traditions that settlers brought from Europe, Mexico, and the United States. In fact, one way to trace settlement patterns and ethnic dispersion in Texas is by mapping the different typ...

The astonishing, hitherto unknown truths about a disease that transformed the United States at its birthA horrifying epidemic of smallpox was sweeping across the Americas when the American Revolution began, and yet we know almost nothing about it. Elizabeth A. Fenn is the first historian to reveal how deeply variola affected the outcome of the war in every colony and the lives of everyone in North America.By 1776, when military action and political ferment ...

A National Book Award Nominee and a Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year.Over the centuries, Florida has been many things: an unconquered realm protected by geography, a wilderness that ruined Spanish conquistadors, “God’s waiting room,” and a place to start over. Depopulated after the extermination of its original native population, today it’s home to nineteen million. The site of vicious racial violence, including massacres, slavery, and the r...

In Sleuthing the Alamo, historian James E. Crisp draws back the curtain on years of mythmaking to reveal some surprising truths about the Texas Revolution--truths often obscured by both racism and "political correctness," as history has been hijacked by combatants in the culture wars of the past two centuries. Beginning with a very personal prologue recalling both the pride and the prejudices that he encountered in the Texas of his youth, Crisp traces his path to the discovery of documents...

The San Antonio edition of Historical Cities explores the multi-national past of this south Texas city. Fifty-one historic sites and landmarks in the city's downtown and surrounding area are explored. A concise history is also provided. Reference maps for the downtown and San Antonio's environs are included, along with GPS coordinates for all listed historic sites.

From the earliest moments of contact until after World War I, find out what debates raged on behalf of and against Native Americans, how their culture was stripped from them, citizenship denied them, and the schemes against them, to not only steal their land but to make them white. Their contributions to society have been monumental and immeasurable, but their rewards have been few and almost unseen.

This edition in the Historical Cities series explores landmarks and sites within the city of San Francisco. Over 50 sites are divided into the east and west side of the northern end of the Peninsula. Maps and GPS coordinates are included.

In the past few decades, thousands of new memorials to executed witches, victims of terrorism, and dead astronauts, along with those that pay tribute to civil rights, organ donors, and the end of Communism have dotted the American landscape. Equally ubiquitous, though until now less the subject of serious inquiry, are temporary memorials: spontaneous offerings of flowers and candles that materialize at sites of tragic and traumatic death. In Memorial Mania, Erika Doss argues that ...

Mob violence in the United States is usually associated with the southern lynch mobs who terrorized African Americans during the Jim Crow era. In Forgotten Dead, William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb uncover a comparatively neglected chapter in the story of American racial violence, the lynching of persons of Mexican origin or descent. Over eight decades lynch mobs murdered hundreds of Mexicans, mostly in the American Southwest. Racial prejudice, a lack of respect for local courts, a...

**Winner of the Ray Allen Billington Prize and the Phillis Wheatley Book Award"An American 'Odyssey,' the larger-than-life story of a man who travels far in the wake of war and gets by on his adaptability and gift for gab." —Wall Street Journal**A black child born on the US-Mexico border in the twilight of slavery, William Ellis inhabited a world divided along ambiguous racial lines. Adopting the name Guillermo Eliseo, he passed as Mexican, transcending racial line...

More than 50,000 Indians lived in the area now known as North Carolina at the time of Christopher Columbuss arrival in the New World. The Formation North Carolina Coastal and Eastern Counties examines the history of this Native American Indian population. It also focuses upon the formation of North Carolina from colonial times; tracing the origins of its earliest settlers, including Native Americans. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the number of American Indians on offici...

Don't ever search for area codes again! This book brings North American Area Codes to your fingertips.TABLE OF CONTENTS:Area Codes: 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900By state, province or country: United States Canada Caribbean and BermudaNumbering Plan: Current system Dialing plans Charges History Calls to Mexico (until 1991) Expansion of area codes Splits and overlays Expansion issues Decrease in expansion rate Alphabetic mnemonic system Cellular services and the NANP numbering scheme New a...