Enduring Motives examines tradition and religious beliefs as they are expressed in landscape, the built environment, visual symbols, stories, and ritual.Bringing together archaeologists and Native American experts, this volume focuses on long-lived religious traditions of the native peoples of the Americas and how religion codifies, justifies, and reinforces these traditions by placing a high value on continuity of beliefs and practice.Using clues from the archaeol...

By the time of the Civil War, the railroads had advanced to allow the movement of large numbers of troops even though railways had not yet matured into a truly integrated transportation system. Gaps between lines, incompatible track gauges, and other vexing impediments remained in both the North and South. As John E. Clark explains in this compelling study, the skill with which Union and Confederate war leaders met those problems and utilized the rail system to its fullest potential was an...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492—from “a remarkably engaging writer” (The New York Times Book Review).Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the lan...

Do You Think You Know the Civil War?The History Buff's Guide to the Civil War clears the powder smoke surrounding the war that changed America forever. The perfect guide for anyone looking for great history facts like:What were the best, the worst, the largest, and the most lethal aspects of the conflict?What are the top ten causes?The bloodiest battles?With over thirty annotated top ten lists and unexpected...

Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? In The Wayfinders, renowned anthropologist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis leads us on a thrilling journey to celebrate the wisdom of the world's indigenous cultures.In Polynesia we set sail with navigators whose ancestors settled the Pacific ten centuries before Christ. In the Amazon we meet the descendants of a true lost civilization, the...

The fascinating story of a lost city and an unprecedented American civilization located in modern day Illinois near St. LouisWhile Mayan and Aztec civilizations are widely known and documented, relatively few people are familiar with the largest prehistoric Native American city north of Mexico-a site that expert Timothy Pauketat brings vividly to life in this groundbreaking book. Almost a thousand years ago, a city flourished along the Mississippi River near what i...

From The New York Times #1 bestselling companion series to the Fox historical docudrama, Bill O’Reilly’s Legends and Lies; The Civil War is a pulse-quickening account of the deadliest war in American history.From the birth of the Republican Party to the Confederacy’s first convention, the Underground Railroad to the Emancipation Proclamation, the Battle of Gettysburg to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Bill O’Reilly’s Le...

Despite the abundance of books on the Civil War, not one has focused exclusively on what was in fact the determining factor in the outcome of the conflict: differences in Union and Southern strategy. In The Grand Design, Donald Stoker provides for the first time a comprehensive and often surprising account of strategy as it evolved between Fort Sumter and Appomattox. Reminding us that strategy is different from tactics (battlefield deployments) and operations (campaigns conducted ...

Scientists not so long ago unanimously believed that people first walked to the New World from northeast Asia across the Bering land bridge at the end of the Ice Age 11,000 years ago. But in the last ten years, new tools applied to old bones have yielded evidence that tells an entirely different story.In Bones, Elaine Dewar records the ferocious struggle in the scientific world to reshape our views of prehistory. She traveled from the Mackenzie River valley in northern Can...

Civil War buffs, be warned: Webb Garrison's Curiosities of the Civil War may catch you off guard.Packed with obscurities and bizarre anecdotes, it spills over with specifics you've likely never heard. Debated, reenacted, and analyzed, the Civil War has been the subject of countless books, films, and scholarly research—many of them quite repetitious. This nuanced perspective on the war provides a glimpse beyond the bloody battles, casualties, and political conflict. You'll ...

From the author of How the World Moves: A revelatory new look at the hallowed, diverse, and threatened landscapes of the American IndianFor thousands of years , Native Americans have told stories about the powers of revered landscapes and sought spiritual direction at mysterious places in their homelands. In this important book, respected scholar and anthropologist Peter Nabokov writes of a wide range of sacred places in Native America. From the “high coun...

Known as an advocate for the endangered earth, Barry Lopez is one of America’s preeminent writers on nature. This invigorating book invites readers to sit down with Lopez and his friend William E. Tydeman to engage with their conversations about activism, the life of the mind, and all things literary. Even readers who think they know everything there is to know about Lopez will learn much from this richly informative book, both from Tydeman’s concise biography of Lopez and from the dialogu...