He may be little known today, but Ben Daniels was a feared gunman who typified the journeyman gunfighter every bit as much as those whose names have become legend. Yet his story has eluded researchers and yarn-spinners alike-until now. Two prominent western historians have teamed up to tell the story of Ben Daniels's rise from outlaw and convict ......
Vocal Republican, accomplished gardener, lover of large cars, Ernest Haycox was nothing if not three-dimensional. Despite a haphazard childhood that included abandonment by his parents, Haycox (1899-1950) decided early on to be a writer. Once he began he did not stop, approaching writing with both an unparalleled passion and a keen business sense ......
Mention Woody Guthrie, and people who know the name are likely to think of the "Okie Bard," dust storms behind him, riding a boxcar or walking a red-dirt road, a battered guitar strapped to his back. But unlock Guthrie from the confines of rural folk and Hollywood mythology, as Will Kaufman does here, and you'll find an abstract painter and ......
Chief John Ross and the Struggle for Tribal Sovereignty
For the Cherokee Nation, the Civil War was more than a contest between the Union and the Confederacy. It was yet another battle in the larger struggle against multiple white governments for land and tribal sovereignty. Cherokee Civil Warrior tells the story of Chief John Ross as he led the tribe in this struggle. The son of a Scottish father and ......
Francisco Garces and the Spanish Encounter with the American Southwest
The explorations of Francisco Garce?s, an intrepid Franciscan friar of the eighteenth century, led to the opening of the first overland route from Mexico to California, produced new knowledge of unmapped terrain and unknown peoples, and revived dreams of Spanish imperial expansion. Beyond the Devil's Road tells, for the first time, the full story ......
Imagine a time when a killer disease took lives at a rate rivaling Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021, and continued that grim harvest year after year, decade after decade. Such a nightmare scenario played out in the state of Arkansas-and across the United States-throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, when the scourge of ......
"The single most destructive act ever perpetrated on any tribe by the United States," Vine Deloria Jr. called it. For the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara communities living on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, the construction of the Garrison Dam as part of the New Deal-era Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program meant the flooding of a ......
The Life and Times of Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana
Burton K. Wheeler (1882-1975) may have been the most powerful politician Montana ever produced, and he was one of the most influential-and controversial-members of the United States Senate during three of the most eventful decades in American history. A New Deal Democrat and lifelong opponent of concentrated power-whether economic, military, or ......
Comparing Ancient Roman and North American Experiences
The Romans who established their rule on three continents as well as the Europeans who initially established new homes in North America interacted with communities of Indigenous peoples with their own histories and cultures. Sweeping in its scope and rigorous in its scholarship, Empires and Indigenous Peoples expands our understanding of their ......