A controversial character largely known (as depicted in the movie Glory) as a Union colonel who led Black soldiers in the Civil War, James Montgomery (1814-71) waged a far more personal and radical war against slavery than popular history suggests. It is the true story of this militant abolitionist that Todd Mildfelt and David D. Schafer tell in ......
Many Anglo-Americans in the nineteenth century regarded Indian tribes as little more than illiterate bands of savages in need of "civilizing." Few were willing to recognize that one of the major Southeastern tribes targeted for removal west of the Mississippi already had an advanced civilization with its own system of writing and rich literary ......
Recovering the Lost History and Culture of Quitobaquito
In the southwestern corner of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, on the border between Arizona and Mexico, one finds Quitobaquito, the second-largest oasis in the Sonoran Desert. There, with some effort, one might also find remnants of once-thriving O'odham communities and their predecessors with roots reaching back at least 12,000 years-along ......
Recovering the Lost History and Culture of Quitobaquito
In the southwestern corner of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, on the border between Arizona and Mexico, one finds Quitobaquito, the second-largest oasis in the Sonoran Desert. There, with some effort, one might also find remnants of once-thriving O'odham communities and their predecessors with roots reaching back at least 12,000 years-along ......
A History from the Napoleonic Wars to the War in Ukraine
With the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin's Russia seems to have stepped out of time, reverting to an imperial era of conquest and expansion. But as Roger Reese points out in this comprehensive new history, Russia's way of war has changed little from one century to the next, one regime to another, from the army of the tsar to the army of today. ......
Imperial and Indigenous Geopolitics in the Trans-Appalachian West, 1670-1774
In 1754 South Carolina governor James Glen observed that the Tennessee River "has its rise in the Cherokee Nation and runs a great way through it." While noting the "prodigious" extent of the corridor connecting the Tennessee, Ohio, and Wabash River valleys-and the Cherokees' "undoubted" ownership of this watershed-Glen and other European ......
For the Seneca Iroquois Indians, song is a crucial means of renewing both medicine and heritage. Two or three times a year, the Little Water Medicine Society of western New York meets to renew the potency of its medicine bundles through singing. These bundles have been inherited from eighteenth century Iroquois war parties, handed down from ......
Longs Peak and the Unfullfilled Promises of America's National Parks
At 14,259 feet, Longs Peak towers over Colorado's northern Front Range. A prized location for mountaineering since the 1870s, Longs has been a place of astonishing climbing feats-and, unsurprisingly, of significant risk and harm. Careless and unlucky climbers have experienced serious injury and death on the peak, while their activities, equipment, ......
Longs Peak and the Unfullfilled Promises of America's National Parks
At 14,259 feet, Longs Peak towers over Colorado's northern Front Range. A prized location for mountaineering since the 1870s, Longs has been a place of astonishing climbing feats-and, unsurprisingly, of significant risk and harm. Careless and unlucky climbers have experienced serious injury and death on the peak, while their activities, equipment, ......