Crimes against Nature reveals the hidden history behind three of the nation's first parklands: the Adirondacks, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. Focusing on conservation's impact on local inhabitants, Karl Jacoby traces the effect of criminalizing such traditional practices as hunting, fishing, foraging, and timber cutting in the newly created parks. Jacoby reassesses the nature of these "crimes" and provides a rich portrait of rural people and their relationship with the natura...

**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...

Drawn from personal recollections, historical records, and biographical research, Capitan Chiquito: A Personal History of an Apache Chief, 1821–1919 relates the little-known life and career of a leader of the Aravaipa band of Apaches during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During his nearly 100 years of life, Chief Capitan Chiquito spent time in prison with Geronimo; defended his home territory in Aravaipa Canyon from the depredations of Anglo-Americans, Mexicans...

A masterful reconstruction of one of the worst Indian massacres in American historyIn April 1871, a group of Americans, Mexicans, and Tohono O?odham Indians surrounded an Apache village at dawn and murdered nearly 150 men, women, and children in their sleep. In the past century the attack, which came to be known as the Camp Grant Massacre, has largely faded from memory. Now, drawing on oral histories, contemporary newspaper reports, and the participants? own accoun...

To his contemporaries in Gilded Age Manhattan, Guillermo Eliseo was a fantastically wealthy Mexican, the proud owner of a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park, a busy Wall Street office, and scores of mines and haciendas in Mexico. But for all his obvious riches and his elegant appearance, Eliseo was also the possessor of a devastating secret: he was not, in fact, from Mexico at all. Rather, he had begun life as a slave named William Ellis, born on a cotton plantation in Texas during ...

*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award**A New York Times Notable Book**Winner of the Texas Book Award and the Oklahoma Book Award*This New York Times bestseller and stunning historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West “is nothing short of a revela...

He was the greatest Indian warrior of the nineteenth century. His victory over General Custer at the battle of Little Bighorn in 1876 was the worst defeat inflicted on the frontier Army. And the death of Crazy Horse in federal custody has remained a controversy for more than a century.The Killing of Crazy Horse pieces together the many sources of fear and misunderstanding that resulted in an official killing hard to distinguish from a crime. A rich cast of characters, whit...

First-Hand Accounts of Slavery in America. With active Table of contents. Hundreds of former slaves were interviewed during the depression as part of the WPA project sponsored by the Library of Congress. This file includes all parts dealing with former slaves in Florida. Other files, published separately, focus on other southern states. In all, there are some two thousand narratives from the following seventeen states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Marylan...

This book is a celebration of life. Its astonishing view is from the perspective of someone living a simple, isolated life in the Rocky Mountains as a mountain man. Sylvan Ambrose Hart was born in the Oklahoma Territory in 1906. In the 1930's, while still a young man, he walked into the Rocky Mountains and designed a unique life for himself in the wilds - hunting, fishing, trapping, panning gold, crafting his own tools, weapons, shelter, and clothes. For almost fifty years he lived the lif...

The classic reference work, in an edition first published before 1923. As a Word document, the file is over 14,000 pages long. We have added over 6,000 links to help you navigate to the word you want. (Searching for a word would take you to any instance of that word in definitions, not the word you want defined). With this version, you click on the first letter, then the first two letters, then on the word that's closest to to the one you want (like the guide words at the heads of pages in...

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the epic New York Times bestselling Civil War biography of Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, who became a great and tragic national hero.Stonewall Jackson has long been a figure of legend and romance. As much as any person in the Confederate pantheon—even Robert E. Lee—he embodies the romantic Southern notion of the virtuous lost cause. Jackson is also cons...

In 1996, at 100 years of age, Edith Haisman, (nee Brown) became the world's oldest living survivor of the Titanic disaster. She was almost sixteen years of age at the time and could well remember those screams and cries for help as the ship sank in those icy waters of the North Atlantic. Those sounds were to haunt her for the rest of her life.