Phoenix, Arizona, is one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the United States. The city's expansion-at the rate of one acre per hour-comes at the expense of its Sonoran Desert environment. For some residents, the American Dream has become a nightmare.In this provocative book, Janine Schipper examines the cultural forces that contribute ......
Land, Violence, and the 1856 San Francisco Vigilance Committee
The California gold rush of 1849 created fortunes for San Francisco merchants, whose wealth depended on control of the city's docks. But ownership of waterfront property was hotly contested. In an 1856 dispute over land titles, a county official shot an outspoken newspaperman, prompting a group of merchants to organize the San Francisco Committee ......
The U-2 Crisis and Eisenhower's Aborted Mission to Moscow, 1959-1960
The history of the Cold War is littered with what-ifs, and in Diplomacy Shot Down, E. Bruce Geelhoed explores one of the most intriguing: What if the Soviets had not shot down the American U-2 spy plane and President Dwight D. Eisenhower had visited the Soviet Union in 1960 as planned? In August 1959, with his second term nearing its end, ......
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, ......
When war broke out between Great Britain and the United States in 1812, Sir George Prevost, captain general and governor in chief of British North America, was responsible for defending a group of North American colonies that stretched as far as the distance from Paris to Moscow. He also commanded one of the largest British overseas forces during ......
For every Wild Bill Hickok or Billy the Kid, there was another western gunfighter just as deadly but not as well known. Robert K. DeArment has earned a reputation as the premier researcher of unknown gunfighters, and here he offers twelve more portraits of men who weren't glorified in legend but were just as notorious in their day.Those who think ......
"The single most destructive act ever perpetrated on any tribe by the United States," Vine Deloria Jr. called it. For the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara communities living on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, the construction of the Garrison Dam as part of the New Deal-era Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program meant the flooding of a ......
Progress on the nation's second transcontinental railroad slowed in 1873. The Northern Pacific's proposed middle-the 250 miles between present Billings and Glendive, Montana-had yet to be surveyed, and Sioux and Cheyenne Indians opposed construction through the Yellowstone Valley, the heart of their hunting grounds. A previous surveying expedition ......
