Download or read book Francis Parkman written by Howard Doughty and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1983 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best known as author of The Oregon Trail, Francis Parkman is now increasingly recognized as one of the greatest nineteenth–century American historians. In Pontiac, Pioneers, La Salle and Montcalm and Wolfe, Parkman, more than anyone else, first grasped the tragic element implicit in our pioneer heritage and placed the opening up of the great North American wilderness in broad historical perspective. Handsome, brilliant, courageous, Parkman drove himself relentlessly. The result was a severe breakdown in his twenties, complicated in later years by other illnesses. This interpretative biography chronicles his triumph over these setbacks and sheds new light on the impressive histories that seem to become ever more contemporary with the passage of time.

Download or read book Mason Wade Acadia and Quebec written by Mason Wade and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1991 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays written by the controversial but significant historian Mason Wade provide his last important work on the Maritimes. Also included is a biography of Wade, an analysis of his enduring importance as an historian and a select bibliography.

Download or read book Francis Parkman Historian as Hero written by Wilbur R. Jacobs and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-07-22 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historian who lived the kind of history he wrote, Francis Parkman is a major—and controversial—figure in American historiography. His narrative style, while popular with readers wanting a "good story," has raised many questions with professional historians. Was Parkman writing history or historical fiction? Did he color historical figures with his own heroic self-image? Was his objectivity compromised by his "unbending, conservative, Brahmin" values? These are some of the many issues that Wilbur Jacobs treats in this thought-provoking study. Jacobs carefully considers the "apprenticeship" of Francis Parkman, first spent in facing the rigors of the Oregon Trail and later in struggling to write his histories despite a mysterious, frequently incapacitating illness. He shows how these events allowed Parkman to create a heroic self-image, which impelled his desire for fame as a historian and influenced his treatment of both the "noble" and the "savage" characters of his histories. In addition to assessing the influence of Parkman's development and personality on his histories, Jacobs comments on Parkman's relationship to basic social and cultural issues of the nineteenth century. These include the slavery question, Native American issues, expansion of the suffrage to new groups, including women, and anti-Catholicism.

Download or read book The Oregon Trail written by Francis Parkman and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 878 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oregon Trail is the gripping account of Francis Parkman's journey west across North America in 1846. After crossing the Allegheny Mountains by coach and continuing by boat and wagon to Westport, Missouri, he set out with three companions on a horseback journey that would ultimately take him over two thousand miles. Map.

Download or read book Devil s Gate written by Tom Rea and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2012-02-15 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Devil’s Gate—the name conjures difficult passage and portends a doubtful outcome. In this eloquent and captivating narrative, Tom Rea traces the history of the Sweetwater River valley in central Wyoming—a remote place including Devil’s Gate, Independence Rock, and other sites along a stretch of the Oregon Trail—to show how ownership of a place can translate into owning its story. Seemingly in the middle of nowhere, Devil’s Gate is the center of a landscape that threatens to shrink any inhabitants to insignificance except for one thing: ownership of the land and the stories they choose to tell about it. The static serenity of the once heavily traveled region masks a history of conflict. Tom Sun, an early rancher, played a role here in the lynching of the only woman ever hanged in Wyoming. The lynching was dismissed as swift frontier justice in the wake of cattle theft, but Rea finds more complicated motives that involve land and water rights. The Sun name was linked with the land for generations. In the 1990s, the Mormon Church purchased part of the Sun ranch to memorialize Martin’s Cove as the site of handcart pioneers who froze to death in the valley in 1856. The treeless, arid country around Devil’s Gate seems too immense for ownership. But stories run with the land. People who own the land can own the stories, at least for a time.

Download or read book Great River written by Paul Horgan and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-01 with total page 1041 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pulitzer Prize– and Bancroft Prize–winning epic history of the American Southwest from the acclaimed twentieth-century author of Lamy of Santa Fe. Great River was hailed as a literary masterpiece and enduring classic when it first appeared in 1954. It is an epic history of four civilizations—Native American, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American—that people the Southwest through ten centuries. With the skill of a novelist, the veracity of a scholar, and the love of a long-time resident, Paul Horgan describes the Rio Grande, its role in human history, and the overlapping cultures that have grown up alongside it or entered into conflict over the land it traverses. Now in its fourth revised edition, Great River remains a monumental part of American historical writing. “Here is known and unknown history, emotion and color, sense and sensitivity, battles for land and the soul of man, cultures and moods, fused by a glowing pen and a scholarly mind into a cohesive and memorable whole.” —The Boston Sunday Herald “Transcends regional history and soars far above the river valley with which it deals . . . a survey, rich in color and fascinating in pictorial detail, of four civilizations: the aboriginal Indian, the Spanish, the Mexican, and the Anglo-American . . . It is, in the best sense of the word, literature. It has architectural plan, scholarly accuracy, stylistic distinction, and not infrequently real nobility of spirit.” —Allan Nevins, author of Ordeal of the Union “One of the major masterpieces of American historical writing.” —Carl Carmer, author of Stars Fell on Alabama

Download or read book Women and Men on the Overland Trail written by John Mack Faragher and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic book offers a lively and penetrating analysis of what the overland journey was really like for midwestern farm families in the mid-1800s. Through the subtle use of contemporary diaries, memoirs, and even folk songs, John Mack Faragher dispels the common stereotypes of male and female roles and reveals the dynamic of pioneer family relationships. This edition includes a new preface in which Faragher looks back on the social context in which he formulated his original thesis and provides a new supplemental bibliography. Praise for the earlier edition: "Faragher has made excellent use of the Overland Trail materials, using them to illuminate the society the emigrants left as well as the one they constructed en route. His study should be important to a wide range of readers, especially those interested in family history, migration and western history, and women's history."--Kathryn Kish Sklar "An enlightening study."--American West "A helpful study which not only illuminates the daily life of rural Americans but which also begins to compensate for the male orientation of so much of western history."--Journal of Social History

Download or read book American Writers and the Picturesque Tour written by Beth L. Lueck and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-28 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores a beloved genre Even before the age of the Romantics, travel literature was a favorite genre of English and American writers and readers. After the War of 1812, Americans' passion for scenic beauty inspired them to take the picturesque tour of America as well as going to Europe for the requisite Grand Tour. The written American version of the popular British tour in various guidebooks helped shape the literature of the new nation as nearly every major writer of the first half of the 19th century contributed to it from Poe, who provided several comic pieces, and Irving to Thoreau, for whom the tour symbolized moral and spiritual growth, and Margaret Fuller. Offers new perspectives American writers adapted the picturesque to express their nationalistic sentiments; picturesque discourse offered a flexible series of conventions that enable writers to celebrate the places, people, and legends that set America apart. This volume demonstrates the vital role of this genre in the formation of national literary taste and national culture and offers fresh and exciting perspectives on the topic. Includes index. Also includes maps.

Download or read book The La Salle Expedition to Texas written by William Foster and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-08 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Those of us who knew how to swim crossed to the other bank. But a number of our company did not know how to swim, and I was among that number. One of the Indians gave me a sign to go get a nearly dry log . . . then, fastening a strap on each end, he made us understand that we should hold on to the log with one arm and try to swim with the other arm and our feet . . . While trying to swim . . . I accidentally hit the Father in the stomach. At that moment he thought he was lost and, I assure you, he invoked the patron saint of his order, St. Francis, with all his heart. I could not keep from laughing although I could see I was in peril of drowning. But the Indians on the other side saw all this and came to our help . . . “Still there were others to get across. . . . We made the Indians understand that they must go help them, but because they had become disgusted by the last trip, they did not want to return again. This distressed us greatly.”—From Henri Joute’s journal, March 23, 1687, shortly after La Salle was murdered. The La Salle Expedition in Texas presents the definitive English translation of Henri Joutel’s classic account of Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle’s 1684–1687 expedition to establish a fort and colony near the mouth of the Mississippi River. Written from detailed notes taken during this historic journey, Joutel’s journal is the most comprehensive and authoritative account available of this dramatic story of adventure and misadventure in Texas. Joutel, who served as post commander for La Salle, describes in accurate and colorful detail the daily experiences and precise route La Salle’s party followed in 1687 from the Texas coast to the Mississippi River. By carefully comparing Joutel’s compass directions and detailed descriptions to maps and geographic locations, Foster has established where La Salle was murdered by his men, and has corrected many erroneous geographic interpretations made by French and American scholars during the past century. Joutel’s account is a captivating narrative set in a Texas coastal wilderness. Foster follows Joutel, La Salle, and their fellow adventurers as they encounter Indians and their unique cultures; enormous drifting herds of bison; and unknown flora and fauna, including lethal flowering cactus fruit and rattlesnakes. The cast of characters includes priests and soldiers, deserters and murderers, Indian leaders, and a handful of French women who worked side-by-side with the men. It is a remarkable first hand tale of dramatic adventure as these diverse individuals meet and interact on the grand landscape of Texas. Joutel’s journal, newly translated by Johanna S. Warren, is edited and annotated with an extensive introduction by William C. Foster. The account is accompanied by numerous detailed maps and the first published English translation of the testimony of Pierre Meunier, one of the most knowledgeable and creditable survivors of La Salle’s expedition.

Download or read book Fighting for Defeat written by Michael C. C. Adams and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1992-01-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fighting for Defeat argues that the Union army’s lack of success in the eastern theater early in the Civil War was due largely to its fear that the Confederate army was invincible. Certain to arouse discussion, this study by Michael C. C. Adams combines probing social and psychological analysis, blood-rushing description of events, and candid pictures of President Lincoln, and Generals George McClellan and Ulysses Grant, among many others. It was first published in 1978 with the main title Our Masters the Rebels.

Download or read book Fran ois Vall and His World written by Carl J. Ekberg and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Francois Valle and His World, Carl Ekberg provides a fascinating biography of Francois Valle (1716-1783), placing him within the context of his place and time. Valle, who was born in Beauport, Canada, immigrated to Upper Louisiana (the Illinois Country) as a penniless common laborer sometime during the early 1740s. Engaged in agriculture, lead mining, and the Indian trade, he ultimately became the wealthiest and most powerful individual in Upper Louisiana, although he never learned to read or write. Ekberg focuses on Upper Louisiana in colonial times, long before Lewis and Clark arrived in the Mississippi River valley and before American sovereignty had reached the eastern bank of the Mississippi. He vividly captures the ambience of life in the eighteenth-century frontier agricultural society that Valle inhabited, shedding new light on the French and Spanish colonial regimes in Louisiana and on the Mississippi River frontier before the Americans arrived. Based entirely on primary source documents wills and testaments, parish registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials, and Spanish administrative correspondence found in archives ranging from St. Louis and Ste. Genevieve to New Orleans and Seville, Francois Valle and His World traces not only the life of Francois Valle and the lives of his immediate family members, but also the lives of his slaves. In doing so, it provides a portrait of Missouri's very first black families, something that has never before been attempted. Ekberg also analyzes how the illiterate Valle became the richest person in all of Upper Louisiana, and how he rose in the sociopolitical hierarchy to become an important servant of the Spanish monarchy. Francois Valle and His World provides a useful corrective to the fallacious notion that Missouri's history began with the arrival of Lewis and Clark at the turn of the nineteenth century. Anyone with an interest in colonial history or the history of the Mississippi River valley will find this book of great value.

Download or read book The Oregon Trail written by Francis Parkman, Jr. and published by Oxford Paperbacks. This book was released on 2008-07-10 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oregon Trail is the gripping account of Francis Parkman's journey west across North America in 1846. His detailed description of the journey, set against the vast majesty of the Great Plains, has emerged through the generations as a classic narrative of one man's exploration of the American Wilderness.

Download or read book The Rise of the American Conservation Movement written by Dorceta E. Taylor and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-04 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sweeping social history Dorceta E. Taylor examines the emergence and rise of the multifaceted U.S. conservation movement from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. She shows how race, class, and gender influenced every aspect of the movement, including the establishment of parks; campaigns to protect wild game, birds, and fish; forest conservation; outdoor recreation; and the movement's links to nineteenth-century ideologies. Initially led by white urban elites—whose early efforts discriminated against the lower class and were often tied up with slavery and the appropriation of Native lands—the movement benefited from contributions to policy making, knowledge about the environment, and activism by the poor and working class, people of color, women, and Native Americans. Far-ranging and nuanced, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement comprehensively documents the movement's competing motivations, conflicts, problematic practices, and achievements in new ways.

Download or read book The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience written by G. Edward White and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2012-07-25 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1968, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience has become a classic in the field of American studies. G. Edward White traces the origins of “the West of the imagination” to the adolescent experiences of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister—three Easterners from upper-class backgrounds who went West in the 1880s in search of an alternative way of life. Each of the three men came to identify with a somewhat idealized “Wild West” that embodied the virtues of individualism, self-reliance, and rugged masculinity. When they returned East, they popularized this image of the West through art, literature, politics, and even their public personae. Moreover, these Western virtues soon became and have remained American virtues—a patriotic ideal that links Easterners with Westerners. With a multidisciplinary blend of history, biography, sociology, psychology, and literary criticism, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience will appeal to a wide audience. The author has written a new preface, offering additional perspectives on the mythology of the West and its effect on the American character.

Download or read book Pueblo Hardscrabble Greenhorn written by Janet Lecompte and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1980-11-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pueblo, Hardscrabble, and Greenhorn were among the very first white settlements in Colorado. In their time they were the most westerly settlements in American territory, and they attracted a lively and varied population of mavericks from more civilized parts of the world-from what became New Mexico to the south and from as far east as England. The inhabitants of these little walled towns thrived on the rigor and freedom of frontier life. Many were ex-trappers full already of frontier expertise. Others were enthusiastic neophytes happy to escape problems back home. They sought Mexican wives in Taos or Santa Fe or allied themselves with the native Indian tribes, or both. The fur trade and the illegal liquor trade with the Indians were at first the mainstays of their economy. As time went on they extended their activities to farming illegally on the land owned by the Indians and trading their crops and other trade articles. They enjoyed themselves hunting, gambling, trading, and with their women, freely mixing Spanish, Indian, and Anglo-American cultures in a community without laws or bigotry. This idyll was brought to a close by the Mexican War and the lure of the California Gold Rush of 1849. The expectation of a railroad on the Arkansas brought many of the settlers back, only to be scared away again by the massacre of Pueblo by the Utes in 1854 of which Mrs. Lecompte has reconstructed a very complete record. When the gold seekers rushed to Pikes Peak in 1858 and stayed to establish farms and towns, some of the pioneers of the early days returned with them, and shared their skills and knowledge to make possible the permanent settlements that resulted. Mrs. Lecompte has documented the history of the region from diaries, letters, and the reports of such distinguished passers-by as J. C. Fremont and Francis Parkman. The result is a complete and compelling account of a neglected part of American frontier life. It is illustrated with more than fifty photographs and contemporary drawings.

Download or read book Harvard Guide to American History written by Frank Freidel and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1974 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Editions for 1954 and 1967 by O. Handlin and others.

Download or read book Great Lakes Indians written by William J. Kubiak and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 1999-10-01 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This illustrated guide introduces the cultures of 25 tribes of Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Siouan stock. Includes 139 sketches and paintings, plus a map showing the locations of each tribe.