From the 1920s to the end of the Second World War, the American experience was one of both unbounded optimism, monumental achievements, and tragic loss. In Giants in their Time, the latest volume in the Representative Americans Series, noted historian Norman K. Risjord uses biographical sketches to create a composite portrait of the United States during this dynamic and trying period.Beginning with the promise held by Americans in the 1920s, Risjord focuses on the creative genius o...

Populists and Progressives, Norman K Risjord's next book in the Representative Americans series, gives readers a fascinating glimpse into the tumultuous turn of the twentieth century.Risjord brings together brief biographies to explore the political, social, and cultural dimensions of the period from 1890–1920. The work begins by personifying the rise of big business and the early struggle between capital and labor with profiles of John D. Rockefeller and Mother Jones. Next, a comp...

Americans in the middle decades of the nineteenth century were a people with boundless energy capable of heroic deeds, monumental achievements, and tragic errors. In The Civil War Generation, his newest volume in The Representative Americans series, noted scholar Norman K. Risjord uses biographical sketches to create a composite portrait of the United States during and immediately after the Civil War.Risjord begins his study with Stephen A. Douglas and Frederick D...

What do Paul Bunyan, Charles Lindbergh, and Jesse Ventura have in common? Minnesota, of course! In A Popular History of Minnesota, historian Norman K. Risjord offers a grand tour of the state's remarkable history. This highly readable volume details everything from the glacial formation of the land to the arrival of the Dakota and the Ojibwe people, from Minnesota's contributions to the Northern cause during the Civil War to the key players in reform politics who helped sculpt the identity...

In Shining Big Sea Water, historian Norman K. Risjord offers a grand tour of Lake Superior's remarkable history, taking readers through the centuries and into the lives of those who have traveled the lake and inhabited its shores.Through lively, informative chapters, Risjord begins with the lake's cataclysmic geological birth, then explores the lives of native peoples along the shore before European contact and during the fur trade, showing how Superior functioned as an unusual "bl...

At the height of the Depression, the government put thousands of writers to work for the Works Progress Administration. Out of their efforts came the American Guide series, the first comprehensive guidebooks to the people, resources, and traditions of each state in the nation.The WPA Guide to Wisconsin offers a lively tour of yesterday's Badger State. More than a nostalgic snapshot of 1930s Wisconsin, this book contains essays on the state's history and architecture, folklore and g...

Each generation of Americans has a special flavor, a character of its own. Sometimes a memorable decade, such as the 'Gay Nineties' or the 'Roaring Twenties,' imprinted the generation that lived and outlived it. Yet no simple rubric comes easily to mind when one thinks of the Revolutionary generation. Their accomplishments were too grand, their interests too varied, to be encompassed in a single phrase. Risjord divides this book into three sections, each exploring one of the era's dominant...