Juan Bautista de Anza led the Spanish colonizing expedition in 1775-76 that opened a trail from Arizona to California and established a presidio at San Francisco Bay. Franciscan missionary Fray Pedro Font accompanied Anza. As chaplain and geographer, Font kept a detailed daily record of the expedition's progress that today is considered one of the ......
Having banished eastern Native peoples to lands west of the Mississippi, President Andrew Jackson's government by 1833 needed a new type of soldier to keep displaced Indians from returning home. And so the 1st Dragoons came into being. Will and John Gorenfeld tell their story-an epic of exploration, conquest, and diplomacy from the outposts of ......
Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Hard Choices in the 1970s
The 1970s were a decade of historic American energy crises-major interruptions in oil supplies from the Middle East, the country's most dangerous nuclear accident, and chronic shortages of natural gas. In Energy Crises, Jay Hakes brings his expertise in energy and presidential history to bear on the questions of why these crises occurred, how ......
Wily Odysseus. Bold Achilles. Brave Hektor. Beautiful Helen of Troy. For centuries, people around the world have been fascinated by these figures and their tragic war as recounted in Homer's Iliad, long admired and studied as one of the foremost epic poems of the ancient world. In The Iliad as Politics, Dean Hammer revisits this epic with a new ......
In War-Path and Bivouac, published in 1890, John Finerty (1846-1908) recalled the summer he spent following George Crook's infamous campaign against the Sioux in 1876. Historians have long surmised that Finerty's correspondence covering the campaign for the Chicago Times reappeared in its entirety in Finerty's celebrated book. But that turns out ......
"Do you think you could teach Rock Hudson to talk like you do?"The question came from famed Hollywood director George Stevens, and an affirmative answer propelled Bob Hinkle into a fifty-year career in Hollywood as a speech coach, actor, producer, director, and friend to the stars. Along the way, Hinkle helped Rock Hudson, Dennis Hopper, Carroll ......
The Last Spanish Exploration of the Northwest Coast of America
The Sutil and Mexicana sailed along the coast of the Pacific Northwest in 1792, their stated mission to put to rest the persistent rumors of the mythical strait connecting the Pacific and Atlantic in the neighborhood of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the present-day border of Canada and the United States. This would be the last Spanish exploration ......
During the Vietnam era, conscientious objectors received both sympathy and admiration from many Americans. It was not so during World War II. The pacifists who chose to sit out that war-some 72,000 men-were publicly derided as "yellowbellies" or extreme cowards. After all, why would anyone refuse to fight against fascism in "the good war"?This ......
Devoted wife and mother. Acclaimed novelist, illustrator, and interpreter of the American West. At a time when society expected women to concentrate on family and hearth, Mary Hallock Foote (1847-1938) published twelve novels, four short story collections, almost two dozen stories and essays, and innumerable illustrations. In Mary Hallock Foote, ......
