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. ......
Prostitution, gambling, and saloons were a vital, if not universally welcome, part of life in frontier boomtowns. In Saloons, Prostitutes, and Temperance in Alaska Territory, Catherine Holder Spude explores the rise and fall of these enterprises in Skagway, Alaska, between the gold rush of 1897 and the enactment of Prohibition in 1918. Her gritty ......
Tornadoes, nature's most violent and unpredictable storms, descend from the clouds nearly one thousand times yearly and have claimed eighteen thousand American lives since 1880. However, the U.S. Weather Bureau--fearing public panic and believing tornadoes were too fleeting for meteorologists to predict--forbade the use of the word "tornado" in ......
Although Scots have never been an exceptionally large immigrant group in North America, their presence to the West proved significant in a variety of arenas. In this unique and engaging new book, Ferenc Morton Szasz outlines the many contributions Scots have made to the development of the region.This book illuminates the many Scottish explorers, ......
Indigenous Education in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
The Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) was founded in 1709 by Scottish Lowlanders for the education of Highlanders: specifically to convert them from the Gaelic language to English, from the Episcopal faith to Presbyterianism, and from latent Jacobitism to loyalty to the crown. In a transatlantic translation of ......
Herbert C. Pell, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Limits of InternationalLaw
The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial has become a symbol of justice, the pivotal moment when the civilized world stood up for Europe's Jews and, ultimately, for human rights. Yet the world, represented at the time by the Allied powers, almost did not stand up despite the magnitude of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis. Seeking justice for the ......
The defeat of George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn was big news in 1876. Newspaper coverage of the battle initiated hot debates about whether the U.S. government should change its policy toward American Indians and who was to blame for the army's loss-the latter, an argument that ignites passion to ......
Theater and Culture in the Pacific Northwest, 1890-1920
Like many western boomtowns at the turn of the twentieth century, Spokane, Washington, enjoyed a lively theatrical scene, ranging from plays, concerts, and operas to salacious variety and vaudeville shows. Yet even as Spokanites took pride in their city's reputation as a "good show town," the more genteel among them worried about its "Wild West" ......
In the half century after World War II, California's Santa Clara Valley transformed from a rolling landscape of fields and orchards into the nation's most consequential high-tech industrial corridor. How Santa Clara Valley became Silicon Valley and came to embody both the triumphs and the failures of a new vision of the American West is the ......
