Wartime diaries and letters provide the sources for a composite portrait of the Union soldier

Biographical portraits of leading American statesmen from Thomas Jefferson to Franklin D. Roosevelt provide insight into the main currents of the nation's political heritage

Offers the late president's candid reflections on his office and leadership, his predecessors, politics and government in America, and his ever-controversial decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan

Ivan Doig recalls growing up among the ranches and wilderness of Montana with his father and grandmother, and their friends in the rural community

Pioneer women going west carried distinct images of themselves and of American Indians. Their views reflected stereotypes pervading the popular literature and journalism of the nineteenth century: women were weak and defenseless, their westward trek was a noble mission, and American Indians were savages. But as a result of their frontier experience, many women changed or discarded their earlier opinions. This book is the first account of how and why pioneer women altered their self-images and their views of American Indians. In Women and Indians on the Frontier, Riley substantially revises the conventional melodramatic picture of pioneer women cowering when confronted with Indians. Frontier life required women to be self-reliant, independent, and hardy: as they learned to adapt, frontierswomen also learned to reexamine stereotypes in the light of experience. Interestingly, Riley explains, while pioneer women frequently changed their beliefs about Indians, they did not often revise their attitudes toward Mormon or Mexican women following contact with them. Frontierswomen also differed from men, whose unfavorable impression of Indians seldom changed. Riley's work is an important addition to Western history, women's studies, and American Indian studies. She examines in detail images and myths of both women and Indians, using examples from history, literature, and film, complemented by period photographs and illustrations. Her comparative account will interest a variety of scholars concerned with cultures in conflict and transition.

A history and psychological interpretation of Salem witchcraft in 1692

On June 2, 1864, Ulysses S. Grant post­poned until the following morning an assault on Confederate lines near Cold Harbor planned for that afternoon be­cause of delays in positioning troops. In the meantime, Confederate forces strengthened their lines, and the assault became a slaughter that haunted Grant for the rest of his life. Thus began a summer of frustration for the general-in-chief of the U.S. Army. By failing to press their advantage, Major General William F. “Baldy

Vol 11. Great condition.

Letters from Grant to his wife, fellow officers, and government officials accompany his account of his life as a soldier, from West Point to the end of the Civil War

Originally published in 1863, out-of-print and unavailable for almost a century, Frances Anne Kemble's Journal has long been recognized by historians as unique in the literature of American slavery and invaluable for obtaining a clear view of the "peculiar institution" and of life in the antebellum South. Fanny Kemble was one of the leading lights of the English stage in the nineteenth century. During a tour of America in the 1830s she met and married a wealthy Philadelphian, Pierce Butler, part of whose fortune derived from his family's vast cotton and rice plantation on the Sea Islands of Georgia. After their marriage she spent several months living on the plantation. Profoundly shocked by what she saw, she recorded her observations of plantation life in a series of journal entries written as letters to a friend. But she never sent the letters, and not until the Civil War was on and Fanny was divorced from Pierce Butler and living in England were they published. This Brown Thrasher edition incorporates the valuable introduction written by John A. Scott for the 1961 edition published by Alfred A. Knopf, together with the editor's appendices to that edition. It provides the modern reader with the historical and biographical background to move freely and with ease in Mrs. Kemble's world.