Traces the sources of power and large-scale organization of prehistoric peoples among Archaic societies.By focusing on the first instances of mound building, pottery making, fancy polished stone and bone, as well as specialized chipped stone, artifacts, and their widespread exchange, this book explores the sources of power and organization among Archaic societies. It investigates the origins of these technologies and their effects on long-term (evolutionary) and sh...

This book contains slave narratives from Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Reverend Noah Davis, Josiah Henson, James W. C. Pennington, John Thompson, and Henry Watson, all of whom had major connections to Maryland. It also contains twenty-two additional slave narratives collected by the Work Projects Administration (WPA) and two others.The difficulties of Harriet Tubman, often called “The Moses of Her People,” which is the title of the famous boo...

Burnt-Out Fires deals with a very dark period of American history, a period that, until recently, had been purposefully forgotten ... a period that hopefully will cause a re-evaluation of the American ideals and dreams.Everyone pointed to the Modocs as “model Indians.” Living on the Oregon-California border, they had assimilated the American culture more than any other Indian tribe. They had accepted the white man’s way, dressing in cowboy clothes and working as farm hands...

When fourteen-year-old Cody Carter’s grandfather gives him a box of dusty leather journals written by their Carter ancestors, even the history-loving Cody could not have predicted the adventure he was about to take. Journal by journal, Cody is physically transported back in time to experience the lives of Carters on the frontier in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Indiana as the family moved ever westward in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He hunts with Daniel Boone, huddles in a fr...

This Contemporaneous account tells of the destruction caused by the three consecutive devastating storms during the month of December 1839.First published in pamphlet form in 1840, Boston.

If burying a child has a special poignancy, the tragedy at a Catholic elementary school in Chicago almost forty years ago was an extraordinary moment of grief. One of the deadliest fires in American history, it took the lives of ninety-two children and three nuns at Our Lady of the Angels School, left many families physically and psychologically scarred for life, and destroyed a close-knit working-class neighborhood. This is the moving story of that fire and its consequences written by two...

The matriarch of a remarkable African American family, Sally Thomas went from being a slave on a tobacco plantation, to a "virtually free" slave who ran her own business and purchased one of her sons out of bondage. In Search of the Promised Land offers a vivid portrait of the extended Thomas-Rapier family and of the life of slaves before the Civil War. Based on family letters as well as an autobiography by one of Thomas' sons, this remarkable piece of detective work follows a sin...

The Catskills (“Cat Creek” in Dutch), America’s original frontier, northwest of New York City, with its seven hundred thousand acres of forest land preserve and its five counties—Delaware, Greene, Sullivan, Ulster, Schoharie; America’s first great vacationland; the subject of the nineteenth-century Hudson River School paintings that captured the almost godlike majesty of the mountains and landscapes, the skies, waterfalls, pastures, cliffs . . . refuge and home to poets and gangsters, tyco...

20th Century American History tells about the ideas and issues that have shaped the United States in the 20th century from the bottom up. You can think of it not just as a series of history of America and its people, but a series of lessons. The subjects include exploration, revolution, social and political change, the rise of industry, modern technology and more.Learn English as you read and listen to the descriptions and histories of the United States. Ad...

"How would you like to ship with me?"Dick regarded me with a look of mingled surpise and inquiry."To be explicit: I have been thinking of making the tour of New England in search of sport and adventures. I want a companion. How would you like to ship for the voyage as first mate, with half the fish and half the trouble for your wages?"My kinsman's quench countenance blazed with renewed light: "Cousin Robert, here's my hand on it. I'm ready for anything by land or se...

In Colonial Chesapeake: New Perspectives leading scholars offer interdisciplinary revisionist essays on the political, cultural and social history of early Maryland and Virginia, calling special attention to the importance of power relations, reproductive politics, and identity politics in the shaping of the area. Using primary documents, which are included with the essays, this collection suggests that the multicultural Chesapeake created significant cultural, intellectual, and social nor...

A Dan Josselyn Memorial PublicationA classic resource on early knowledge of prehistoric mounds and the peoples who constructed them in the eastern United StatesWith this accessible volume, Henry Clyde Shetrone made available to general readers the archaeological research data and conclusions concerning the ancient mounds and earthworks that dot the landscape of eastern North America. Dismissing popularly held theories of mysterious giants who built...