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 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...

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...

In the thirty years after the Civil War, the United States blew by Great Britain to become the greatest economic power in world history. That is a well-known period in history, when titans like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan walked the earth.But as Charles R. Morris shows us, the platform for that spectacular growth spurt was built in the first half of the century. By the 1820s, America was already the world's most productive manufacturer, and the most intens...

The tragic saga of the Donner Party has inspired both legend and scholarship ever since the survivors were rescued from the High Sierra snows in the spring of 1847. When archaeologist Donald L. Hardesty and four colleagues—a historian and three other archaeologists—turned their collective attention to the ordeal of the Donner Party, the result was an original and sometimes surprising new study of this pioneer group and their place in the history of overland migration. Now available for the...

Brings together the nation's leading scholars on the prehistory and early history of Alabama and the southeastern USThis fascinating collection was born of a concern with Alabama's past and the need to explore and explain that legacy, so often hidden by the veils of time, ignorance, or misunderstanding. In 1981 The University of Alabama celebrated its 150th anniversary, and each College contributed to the celebration by sponsoring a special symposium. The College o...