When a historic battlefield site is discovered and studied, the focus is often on the “hardware”: remnants of weaponry, ammunition, supplies, and equipment that archaeologists carefully unearth, analyze, conserve, and frequently place on display in museums.But what about the “software”? What can archaeology teach us about the humans involved in the conflict: their social mores and cultural assumptions; their use and understanding of power?In The Archaeology of Engagemen...

The international bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa vividly brings to life the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake that leveled a city symbolic of America's relentless western expansion. Simon Winchester has also fashioned an enthralling and informative informative look at the tumultuous subterranean world that produces earthquakes, the planet's most sudden and destructive force.In the early morning hours of April 18, 1906, ...

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 ...

The 1996 discovery, near Kennewick, Washington, of a 9,000-year-old Caucasoid skeleton brought more to the surface than bones. The explosive controversy and resulting lawsuit also raised a far more fundamental question: Who owns history? Many Indians see archeologists as desecrators of tribal rites and traditions; archeologists see their livelihoods and science threatened by the 1990 Federal reparation law, which gives tribes control over remains in their traditional territories. In this n...

A fascinating account of how the Mississippi River shaped AmericaIn Old Man River, Paul Schneider tells the story of the river at the center of America's rich history—the Mississippi. Some fifteen thousand years ago, the majestic river provided Paleolithic humans with the routes by which early man began to explore the continent's interior. Since then, the river has been the site of historical significance, from the arrival of Spanish and French explorers in...

**Claudio Saunt is an advisor for THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, a film by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt on PBSThis panoramic account of 1776 chronicles the other revolutions unfolding that year across North America, far beyond the British colonies.**In this unique history of 1776, Claudio Saunt looks beyond the familiar story of the thirteen colonies to explore the many other revolutions roiling the turbulent American continent. In that fateful year, the Spanish l...

This collection of informative and pleasurable essays by Henry Petroski elucidates the role of engineers in shaping our environment in countless ways, big and small.In Remaking the World Petroski gravitates this time, perhaps, toward the big: the English Channel tunnel, the Panama Canal, Hoover Dam, the QE2, and the Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia, now the tallest buildings in the world. He profiles Charles Steinmetz, the genius of the General Electric Company; Henry Martyn Robert...

A thrilling re-creation of a crucial campaign in the Mexican-American War and a pivotal moment in America's history.In June 1846, General Stephen Watts Kearny rode out of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, with a thousand cavalrymen of the First United States Dragoons. When his fantastic expedition ended a year and two-thousand miles later, the nation had doubled in size and now stretched from Atlantic to Pacific, fulfilling what many saw as its unique destiny. Kearny's March has all the st...

The first complete history of the nineteenth-century revolt, drawing on original Texan and Mexican sources and on-site inspections of almost every battlefield.Hardly were the last shots fired at the Alamo before the Texas Revolution entered the realm of myth and controversy. French visitor Frederic Gaillardet called it a “Texian Iliad” in 1839, while American Theodore Sedgwick pronounced the war and its resulting legends “almost burlesque.”In this highly re...

So many books about the American West leave out the more intriguing details:When, in 1803, the young USA doubled its size with the purchase from France of an unexplored vastness called La Louisiane, it was a British bank which lent the Americans most of the 15 million that they didn’t have. So the financial papers for the biggest real-estate deal in history are, to this day, held in a London vault. Not many people know that… If his ranching uncle-by-marriage had had his way, the teenaged W...

In Frontier Regulars Robert M. Utley combines scholarship and drama to produce an impressive history of the final, massive drive by the Regular Army to subdue and control the American Indians and open the West during the twenty-five years following the Civil War.Here are incisive accounts of the campaign directed by Major General William Tecumseh Sherman—from the first skirmishes with the Sioux over the Bozeman Trail defenses in 1866 to the final defeat and subjugation of ...

  THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF UFOs People have always been fascinated by lights in the sky. Early astronomers and astrologers, medieval pamphleteers, scientists, navigators, and weather observers, all recorded sightings of strange phenomena. The question is: Were these the same as our modern UFOs? The authors of Return to Magonia have taken a serious, critical look at some of those sightings. Using modern resources and tools, they...