Download or read book The Second Colorado Cavalry written by Christopher M. Rein and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2020-02-13 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Civil War, the Second Colorado Volunteer Regiment played a vital and often decisive role in the fight for the Union on the Great Plains—and in the westward expansion of the American empire. Christopher M. Rein’s The Second Colorado Cavalry is the first in-depth history of this regiment operating at the nexus of the Civil War and the settlement of the American West. Composed largely of footloose ’59ers who raced west to participate in the gold rush in Colorado, the troopers of the Second Colorado repelled Confederate invasions in New Mexico and Indian Territory before wading into the Burned District along the Kansas border, the bloodiest region of the guerilla war in Missouri. In 1865, the regiment moved back out onto the plains, applying what it had learned to peacekeeping operations along the Santa Fe Trail, thus definitively linking the Civil War and the military conquest of the American West in a single act of continental expansion. Emphasizing the cavalry units, whose mobility proved critical in suppressing both Confederate bushwhackers and Indian raiders, Rein tells the neglected tale of the “fire brigade” of the Trans-Mississippi Theater—a group of men, and a few women, who enabled the most significant environmental shift in the Great Plains’ history: the displacement of Native Americans by Euro-American settlers, the swapping of bison herds for fenced cattle ranges, and the substitution of iron horses for those of flesh and bone. The Second Colorado Cavalry offers us a much-needed history of the “guerilla hunters” who helped suppress violence and keep the peace in contested border regions; it adds nuance and complexity to our understanding of the unlikely “agents of empire” who successfully transformed the Central Plains.
Download or read book Scientific and Technical Aerospace Reports written by and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Civil War Scrapbook written by History Colorado and published by Fulcrum Publishing. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A children's multicultural history of the Civil War. This ambitious book emphasizes the roles of the children, women, minorities, and even animals that were involved in the war. Enhanced with historical photographs, drawings, maps, games, and primary quotes from children, the book gives a new perspective on the Civil War.
Download or read book John P Slough written by Richard L. Miller and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2021-04-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Potts Slough, the Union commander at the Battle of Glorieta Pass, lived a life of relentless pursuit for success that entangled him in the turbulent events of mid-nineteenth-century America. As a politician, Slough fought abolitionists in the Ohio legislature and during Kansas Territory’s fourth and final constitutional convention. He organized the 1st Colorado Volunteer Infantry after the Civil War broke out, eventually leading his men against Confederate forces at the pivotal engagement at Glorieta Pass. After the war, as chief justice of the New Mexico Territorial Supreme Court, he struggled to reform corrupt courts amid the territory’s corrosive Reconstruction politics. Slough was known to possess a volcanic temper and an easily wounded pride. These traits not only undermined a promising career but ultimately led to his death at the hands of an aggrieved political enemy who gunned him down in a Santa Fe saloon. Recounting Slough’s timeless story of rise and fall during America’s most tumultuous decades, historian Richard L. Miller brings to life this extraordinary figure.
Download or read book Camping Grounds written by Phoebe S.K. Young and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-01 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the hidden history of camping in American life that connects a familiar recreational pastime to camps for functional needs and political purposes. Camping appears to be a simple proposition, a time-honored way of getting away from it all. Pack up the car and hit the road in search of a shady spot in the great outdoors. For a modest fee, reserve the basic infrastructure--a picnic table, a parking spot, and a place to build a fire. Pitch the tent and unroll the sleeping bags. Sit under the stars with friends or family and roast some marshmallows. This book reveals that, for all its appeal, the simplicity of camping is deceptive, its history and meanings far from obvious. Why do some Americans find pleasure in sleeping outside, particularly when so many others, past and present, have had to do so for reasons other than recreation? Never only a vacation choice, camping has been something people do out of dire necessity and as a tactic of political protest. Yet the dominant interpretation of camping as a modern recreational ideal has obscured the connections to these other roles. A closer look at the history of camping since the Civil War reveals a deeper significance of this American tradition and its links to core beliefs about nature and national belonging. Camping Grounds rediscovers unexpected and interwoven histories of sleeping outside. It uses extensive research to trace surprising links between veterans, tramps, John Muir, African American freedpeople, Indian communities, and early leisure campers in the nineteenth century; tin-can tourists, federal campground designers, Depression-era transients, family campers, backpacking enthusiasts, and political activists in the twentieth century; and the crisis of the unsheltered and the tent-based Occupy Movement in the twenty-first. These entwined stories show how Americans camp to claim a place in the American republic and why the outdoors is critical to how we relate to nature, the nation, and each other.
Download or read book A Misplaced Massacre written by Ari Kelman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-11 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early morning of November 29, 1864, with the fate of the Union still uncertain, part of the First Colorado and nearly all of the Third Colorado volunteer regiments, commanded by Colonel John Chivington, surprised hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho people camped on the banks of Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado Territory. More than 150 Native Americans were slaughtered, the vast majority of them women, children, and the elderly, making it one of the most infamous cases of state-sponsored violence in U.S. history. A Misplaced Massacre examines the ways in which generations of Americans have struggled to come to terms with the meaning of both the attack and its aftermath, most publicly at the 2007 opening of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. This site opened after a long and remarkably contentious planning process. Native Americans, Colorado ranchers, scholars, Park Service employees, and politicians alternately argued and allied with one another around the question of whether the nation’s crimes, as well as its achievements, should be memorialized. Ari Kelman unearths the stories of those who lived through the atrocity, as well as those who grappled with its troubling legacy, to reveal how the intertwined histories of the conquest and colonization of the American West and the U.S. Civil War left enduring national scars. Combining painstaking research with storytelling worthy of a novel, A Misplaced Massacre probes the intersection of history and memory, laying bare the ways differing groups of Americans come to know a shared past.
Download or read book Starving the South written by Andrew F. Smith and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-04-12 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'From the first shot fired at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, to the last shot fired at Appomattox, food played a crucial role in the Civil War. In Starving the South, culinary historian Andrew Smith takes a fascinating gastronomical look at the war and its aftermath. At the time, the North mobilized its agricultural resources, fed its civilians and military, and still had massive amounts of food to export to Europe. The South did not; while people starved, the morale of their soldiers waned and desertions from the Army of the Confederacy increased.....' (Book Jacket)
Download or read book The Three Cornered War written by Megan Kate Nelson and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History A dramatic, riveting, and “fresh look at a region typically obscured in accounts of the Civil War. American history buffs will relish this entertaining and eye-opening portrait” (Publishers Weekly). Megan Kate Nelson “expands our understanding of how the Civil War affected Indigenous peoples and helped to shape the nation” (Library Journal, starred review), reframing the era as one of national conflict—involving not just the North and South, but also the West. Against the backdrop of this larger series of battles, Nelson introduces nine individuals: John R. Baylor, a Texas legislator who established the Confederate Territory of Arizona; Louisa Hawkins Canby, a Union Army wife who nursed Confederate soldiers back to health in Santa Fe; James Carleton, a professional soldier who engineered campaigns against Navajos and Apaches; Kit Carson, a famous frontiersman who led a regiment of volunteers against the Texans, Navajos, Kiowas, and Comanches; Juanita, a Navajo weaver who resisted Union campaigns against her people; Bill Davidson, a soldier who fought in all of the Confederacy’s major battles in New Mexico; Alonzo Ickis, an Iowa-born gold miner who fought on the side of the Union; John Clark, a friend of Abraham Lincoln’s who embraced the Republican vision for the West as New Mexico’s surveyor-general; and Mangas Coloradas, a revered Chiricahua Apache chief who worked to expand Apache territory in Arizona. As we learn how these nine charismatic individuals fought for self-determination and control of the region, we also see the importance of individual actions in the midst of a larger military conflict. Based on letters and diaries, military records and oral histories, and photographs and maps from the time, “this history of invasions, battles, and forced migration shapes the United States to this day—and has never been told so well” (Pulitzer Prize–winning author T.J. Stiles).
Download or read book America Aflame written by David Goldfield and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this spellbinding new history, David Goldfield offers the first major new interpretation of the Civil War era since James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. Where past scholars have limned the war as a triumph of freedom, Goldfield sees it as America's greatest failure: the result of a breakdown caused by the infusion of evangelical religion into the public sphere. As the Second GreatAwakening surged through America, political questions became matters of good and evil to be fought to the death. The price of that failure was horrific, but the carnage accomplished what statesmen could not: It made the United States one nation and eliminated slavery as a divisive force in the Union. The victorious North became synonymous with America as a land of innovation and industrialization, whose teeming cities offered squalor and opportunity in equal measure. Religion was supplanted by science and a gospel of progress, and the South was left behind. Goldfield's panoramic narrative, sweeping from the 1840s to the end of Reconstruction, is studded with memorable details and luminaries such as HarrietBeecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman. There are lesser known yet equally compelling characters, too, including Carl Schurz-a German immigrant, warhero, and postwar reformer-and Alexander Stephens, the urbane and intellectual vice president of the Confederacy. America Aflame is a vivid portrait of the "fiery trial"that transformed the country we live in.
Download or read book Life of George Bent written by George E. Hyde and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2015-01-13 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Bent, the son of William Bent, one of the founders of Bent's Fort on the Arkansas near present La Junta, Colorado, and Owl Woman, a Cheyenne, began exchanging letters in 1905 with George E. Hyde of Omaha concerning life at the fort, his experiences with his Cheyenne kinsmen, and the events which finally led to the military suppression of the Indians on the southern Great Plains. This correspondence, which continued to the eve of Bent's death in 1918, is the source of the narrative here published, the narrator being Bent himself. Almost ninety years have elapsed since the day in 1930 when Mr. Hyde found it impossible to market the finished manuscript of the Bent life down to 1866. (The Depression had set in some months before.) He accordingly sold that portion of the manuscript to the Denver Public Library, retaining his working copy, which carries down to 1875. The account therefore embraces the most stirring period, not only of Bent's own life, but of life on the Plains and into the Rockies. It has never before been published. It is not often that an eyewitness of great events in the West tells his own story. But Bent's narrative, aside from the extent of its chronology (1826 to 1875), has very special significance as an inside view of Cheyenne life and action after the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, which cost so many of the lives of Bent's friends and relatives. It is hardly probable that we shall achieve a more authentic view of what happened, as the Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Sioux saw it.
Download or read book That Day by the Creek written by John Buzzard and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Set in 1864 Colorado Territory, based on the actual occurrences leading up to the Sand Creek Massacre of Cheyenne and Arapahoe "friendly Indians," led by John Chivington. The main character in this novel is fictional, but much of the novel is based on actual historical people and events. John Buzzard deals with the historical people, issues, and events with a clear eye, the wisdom of hindsight, the informed perspective of a researcher. He brings history to life and reminds us not to allow fear, distrust, and anger to escalate to the place where we would ever again experience such a day as That Day by the Creek!" --
Download or read book The Seventh Star of the Confederacy written by Kenneth Wayne Howell and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On February 1, 1861, delegates at the Texas Secession Convention elected to leave the Union. The people of Texas supported the actions of the convention in a statewide referendum, paving the way for the state to secede and to officially become the seventh state in the Confederacy. Soon the Texans found themselves engaged in a bloody and prolonged civil war against their northern brethren. During the curse of this war, the lives of thousands of Texans, both young and old, were changed forever. This new anthology, edited by Kenneth W. Howell, incorporates the latest scholarly research on how Texans experienced the war. Eighteen contributors take us from the battlefront to the home front, ranging from inside the walls of a Confederate prison to inside the homes of women and children left to fend for themselves while their husbands and fathers were away on distant battlefields, and from the halls of the governor’s mansion to the halls of the county commissioner’s court in Colorado County. Also explored are well-known battles that took place in or near Texas, such as the Battle of Galveston, the Battle of Nueces, the Battle of Sabine Pass, and the Red River Campaign. Finally, the social and cultural aspects of the war receive new analysis, including the experiences of women, African Americans, Union prisoners of war, and noncombatants.
Download or read book New Mexico and the Civil War written by Dr. Walter Earl Pittman and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2011-07-07 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the New Mexico Territory was far distant from the main theaters of war, it was engulfed in the same violence and bloodshed as the rest of the nation. The Civil War in New Mexico was fought in the deserts and mountains of the huge territory, which was mostly wilderness, amid the continuing ancient wars against the wild Indian tribes waged by both sides. The armies were small, but the stakes were high: control of the Southwest. Retired lieutenant colonel and Civil War historian Dr. Walter Earl Pittman presents this concise history of New Mexico during the Civil War years from the Confederate invasion of 1861 to the Battles of Valverde and Glorieta to the end of the war.
Download or read book South to Freedom written by Alice L Baumgartner and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant and surprising account of the coming of the American Civil War, showing the crucial role of slaves who escaped to Mexico. The Underground Railroad to the North promised salvation to many American slaves before the Civil War. But thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico, where slavery was abolished in 1837. In South to Freedom, historianAlice L. Baumgartner tells the story of why Mexico abolished slavery and how its increasingly radical antislavery policies fueled the sectional crisis in the United States. Southerners hoped that annexing Texas and invading Mexico in the 1840s would stop runaways and secure slavery's future. Instead, the seizure of Alta California and Nuevo México upset the delicate political balance between free and slave states. This is a revelatory and essential new perspective on antebellum America and the causes of the Civil War.
Download or read book No Hope for Heaven No Fear of Hell written by James C. Kearney and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2016-09-15 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two family names have come to be associated with the violence that plagued Colorado County, Texas, for decades after the end of the Civil War: the Townsends and the Staffords. Both prominent families amassed wealth and achieved status, but it was their resolve to hold on to both, by whatever means necessary, including extra-legal means, that sparked the feud. Elected office was one of the paths to success, but more important was control of the sheriff’s office, which gave one a decided advantage should the threat of gun violence arise. No Hope for Heaven, No Fear of Hell concentrates on those individual acts of private justice associated with the Stafford and Townsend families. It began with an 1871 shootout in Columbus, followed by the deaths of the Stafford brothers in 1890. The second phase blossomed after 1898 with the assassination of Larkin Hope, and concluded in 1911 with the violent deaths of Marion Hope, Jim Townsend, and Will Clements, all in the space of one month.
Download or read book The Three Battles of Sand Creek written by Gregory Michno and published by . This book was released on 2017-02-15 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sand Creek Battle, or Massacre, occurred on November 29-30, 1864, a confrontation between Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians and Colorado volunteer soldiers. The affair was a tragic event in American history, and what occurred there continues to be hotly contested. Indeed, labeling it a “battle” or a “massacre” will likely start an argument before any discussion on the merits even begins. Even questions about who owns the story, and how it should be told, are up for debate. Many questions arise whenever Sand Creek is discussed: were the Indians peaceful? Did they hold white prisoners? Were they under army protection? Were excessive numbers of women and children killed, and were bodies mutilated? Did the Indians fly an American flag? Did the chiefs die stoically in front of their tipis? Were white scalps found in the village? Three hearings were conducted, and there seems to be an overabundance of evidence from which to answer these and other questions. Unfortunately, the evidence only muddies the issues. Award-winning Indian Wars author Gregory Michno divides his study into three sections. The first, “In Blood,” details the events of November 29 and 30, 1864, in what is surely the most comprehensive account published to date. The second section, “In Court,” focuses on the three investigations into the affair, illustrates some of the biases involved, and presents some of the contradictory testimony. The third and final section, “The End of History,” shows the utter impossibility of sorting fact from fiction. Using Sand Creek as well as contemporary examples, Michno examines the evidence of eyewitnesses—all of whom were subject to false memories, implanted memories, leading questions, prejudice, self-interest, motivated reasoning, social, cultural, and political mores, an over-active amygdala, and a brain that had a “mind” of its own—obstacles that make factual accuracy an illusion. Living in a postmodern world of relativism suggests that all history is subject to the fancies and foibles of individual bias. The example of Sand Creek illustrates why we may be witnessing “the end of history.” Studying Sand Creek exposes our prejudices because facts will not change our minds—we invent them in our memories, we are poor eyewitnesses, we follow the leader, we are slaves to our preconceptions, and assuredly we never let truth get in the way of what we already think, feel, or even hope. We do not believe what we see; instead, we see what we believe. Michno’s extensive research includes primary and select secondary studies, including recollections, archival accounts, newspapers, diaries, and other original records. The Three Battles of Sand Creek will take its place as the definitive account of this previously misunderstood, and tragic, event.
Download or read book Civil War in the Southwest written by Jerry D. Thompson and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written "to set the record straight," these veterans' stories provide colorful accounts of the bloody battles of Valverde, Glorieta, and Peralta, as well as details fo the soldier's tragic and painful retreat back to Texas in the summer of 1862.
