Populists and Progressives, Norman K Risjord's next book in the Representative Americans series, gives readers a fascinating glimpse into the tumultuous turn of the twentieth century.Risjord brings together brief biographies to explore the political, social, and cultural dimensions of the period from 1890–1920. The work begins by personifying the rise of big business and the early struggle between capital and labor with profiles of John D. Rockefeller and Mother Jones. Next, a comp...

Americans in the middle decades of the nineteenth century were a people with boundless energy capable of heroic deeds, monumental achievements, and tragic errors. In The Civil War Generation, his newest volume in The Representative Americans series, noted scholar Norman K. Risjord uses biographical sketches to create a composite portrait of the United States during and immediately after the Civil War.Risjord begins his study with Stephen A. Douglas and Frederick D...

What do Paul Bunyan, Charles Lindbergh, and Jesse Ventura have in common? Minnesota, of course! In A Popular History of Minnesota, historian Norman K. Risjord offers a grand tour of the state's remarkable history. This highly readable volume details everything from the glacial formation of the land to the arrival of the Dakota and the Ojibwe people, from Minnesota's contributions to the Northern cause during the Civil War to the key players in reform politics who helped sculpt the identity...

At the height of the Depression, the government put thousands of writers to work for the Works Progress Administration. Out of their efforts came the American Guide series, the first comprehensive guidebooks to the people, resources, and traditions of each state in the nation.The WPA Guide to Wisconsin offers a lively tour of yesterday's Badger State. More than a nostalgic snapshot of 1930s Wisconsin, this book contains essays on the state's history and architecture, folklore and g...

From the 1920s to the end of the Second World War, the American experience was one of both unbounded optimism, monumental achievements, and tragic loss. In Giants in their Time, the latest volume in the Representative Americans Series, noted historian Norman K. Risjord uses biographical sketches to create a composite portrait of the United States during this dynamic and trying period.Beginning with the promise held by Americans in the 1920s, Risjord focuses on the creative genius o...

Each generation of Americans has a special flavor, a character of its own. Sometimes a memorable decade, such as the 'Gay Nineties' or the 'Roaring Twenties,' imprinted the generation that lived and outlived it. Yet no simple rubric comes easily to mind when one thinks of the Revolutionary generation. Their accomplishments were too grand, their interests too varied, to be encompassed in a single phrase. Risjord divides this book into three sections, each exploring one of the era's dominant...

In Shining Big Sea Water, historian Norman K. Risjord offers a grand tour of Lake Superior's remarkable history, taking readers through the centuries and into the lives of those who have traveled the lake and inhabited its shores.Through lively, informative chapters, Risjord begins with the lake's cataclysmic geological birth, then explores the lives of native peoples along the shore before European contact and during the fur trade, showing how Superior functioned as an unusual "bl...

In the nail-biting western *Last Stand at Sabre River*, a Civil War veteran returns home to find a Yankee's private army living on his land, while another enemy waits to strike...**Paul Cable has come home to Saber River, Arizona. But things have changed since he went away to fight for the Confederacy. A gang of Union men have taken over his house, and they’re refusing to give it back. It seems the war is not over yet for Cable. He is determined to fight for his fa...

Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes has revised and expanded the entire work, which is still the most comprehensive and balanced history of the region. This edition contains significant additional material on early mining in the Pacific Northwest, sea routes to Oregon in the early discovery and contact period, the environment of the region, the impact of the Klondike gold rush, and politics since 1945. Recent environmental controversies, such as endangered salmon runs and the spotted owl dispute, hav...

The Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Harry S. Truman, whose presidency included momentous events from the atomic bombing of Japan to the outbreak of the Cold War and the Korean War, told by America’s beloved and distinguished historian.The life of Harry S. Truman is one of the greatest of American stories, filled with vivid characters—Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Wallace Truman, George Marshall, Joe McCarthy, and Dean Acheson—and dramati...

**“I’ve been thinking a lot about Cadillac Desert in the past few weeks, as the rain fell and fell and kept falling over California, much of which, despite the pouring heavens, seems likely to remain in the grip of a severe drought. Reisner anticipated this moment. He worried that the West’s success with irrigation could be a mirage — that it took water for granted and didn’t appreciate the precariousness of our capacity to control it.” – Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times...

This vivid New York Times bestseller about 1950s America from the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist is "an engrossing sail across a pivotal decade" ( Time ).Joe McCarthy. Marilyn Monroe. The H-bomb. Ozzie and Harriet. Elvis. Civil rights. It's undeniable: The fifties were a defining decade for America, complete with sweeping cultural change and political upheaval. This decade is...