If you want to learn how to choose, maintain, and play the guitar, then check out HowExpert Guide to Playing Guitar.Want to learn guitar? Always wanted to play guitar but never knew where to start? This easy-to-follow guide has everything you need to get started.HowExpert Guide to Playing Guitar is divided into ten chapters that teach you how to play guitar step-by-step, from choosing your first guitar to scales and reading guitar tablature. Every chapter includes plenty of...

Over the generations, Cherokee citizens became a conglomerate people. Early in the nineteenth century, tribal leaders adapted their government to mirror the new American model. While accommodating institutional slavery of black people, they abandoned the Cherokee matrilineal clan structure that once determined their citizenship. The 1851 census revealed a total population nearing 18,000, which included 1,844 slaves and 64 free blacks. What it means to be Cherokee has continued to evolve ov...

"William C. Davis's Three Roads to the Alamo is far and away the best account of the Alamo I have ever read. The portraits of Crockett, Bowie, and Travis are brilliantly sketched in a fast-moving story that keeps the reader riveted to the very last word." — Stephen B. OatesThree Roads to the Alamois the definitive book about the lives of David Crockett, James Bowie and William Barret Travis—the legendary frontiersmen and fighters who met their des...

A sixth-generation North Carolinian, highly-acclaimed author John Ehle grew up on former Cherokee hunting grounds. His experience as an accomplished novelist, combined with his extensive, meticulous research, culminates in this moving tragedy rich with historical detail.The Cherokee are a proud, ancient civilization. For hundreds of years they believed themselves to be the "Principle People" residing at the center of the earth. But by the 18th century, some of their leaders believe...

"Vivid, Comprehensible . . . cuts through decades of mythmaking." —Texas MonthlyPopular culture transformed his memory into “Davy Crockett,” and Hollywood gave him a raccoon hat he hardly ever wore. In this surprising New York Times bestseller, historian Michael Wallis has cast a fresh look at the flesh-and-blood man behind one of the most celebrated figures in American history. More than a riveting story, Wallis’s David Crockett is a rev...

Forbidden Fruit is a collection of fascinating, largely untold tales of ordinary men and women who faced mobs, bloodhounds, bounty hunters, and bullets to be together**—**and defy a system that categorized blacks not only as servants, but as property.In the true love stories of Forbidden Fruit, you will meet sixteen couples who fought for love—love between slaves, between slaves and masters, and between slaves and...

A major one-volume history of the Oregon Trail from its earliest beginnings to the present, by a prize-winning historian of the American West.Starting with an overview of Oregon Country in the early 1800s, a vast area then the object of international rivalry among Spain, Britain, Russia, and the United States, David Dary gives us the whole sweeping story of those who came to explore, to exploit, and, finally, to settle there.Using diaries, journals, company and expedition r...

From a rediscovered collection of autobiographical accounts written by hundreds of Kansas pioneer women in the early twentieth century, Joanna Stratton has created a collection hailed by Newsweek as “uncommonly interesting” and “a remarkable distillation of primary sources.”Never before has there been such a detailed record of women’s courage, such a living portrait of the women who civilized the American frontier. Here are their stories: wilderness mother...

Overnight settlements, better known as "Hell on Wheels," sprang up as the transcontinental railroad crossed Nebraska and Wyoming. They brought opportunity not only for legitimate business but also for gamblers, land speculators, prostitutes, and thugs. Dick Kreck tells their stories along with the heroic individuals who managed, finally, to create permanent towns in the interior West.

A history of the Dakota War of 1862, an Episcopal bishop, and his campaign to protect the lives of the Dakota Sioux.It is hard to recall what powerful moral voices Protestant church leaders had in the formative years of the nation. Gustav Niebuhr travels back to the Minnesota frontier of 1862 when Dakota Sioux rose up against pioneering families and slaughtered hundreds. Citizens demanded mass executions and deportations. Into this turmoil stepped Henry Benjamin Whi...

After the Civil War, the building of the transcontinental railroad was the nineteenth century's most transformative event. Beginning in 1842 with a visionary's dream to span the continent with twin bands of iron, Empire Express captures three dramatic decades in which the United States effectively doubled in size, fought three wars, and began to discover a new national identity. From self--made entrepreneurs such as the Union Pacific's Thomas Durant and er...

This edition in the Historical Cities series explores the history and historic places of Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri. Over 80 points of interest are presented, with reference maps to assist navigation and GPS coordinates for all listed sites. Also included are sites in Independence, Missouri and Shawnee, Kansas.