Empire of the Summer Moon

Author: S. C. Gwynne
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416591060
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize This stunning historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West was a major New York Times bestseller. In the tradition of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a stunningly vivid historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West, centering on Quanah, the greatest Comanche chief of them all. S. C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second entails one of the most remarkable narratives ever to come out of the Old West: the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son Quanah, who became the last and greatest chief of the Comanches. Although readers may be more familiar with the tribal names Apache and Sioux, it was in fact the legendary fighting ability of the Comanches that determined just how and when the American West opened up. Comanche boys became adept bareback riders by age six; full Comanche braves were considered the best horsemen who ever rode. They were so masterful at war and so skillful with their arrows and lances that they stopped the northern drive of colonial Spain from Mexico and halted the French expansion westward from Louisiana. White settlers arriving in Texas from the eastern United States were surprised to find the frontier being rolled backward by Comanches incensed by the invasion of their tribal lands. So effective were the Comanches that they forced the creation of the Texas Rangers and account for the advent of the new weapon specifically designed to fight them: the six-gun. The war with the Comanches lasted four decades, in effect holding up the development of the new American nation. Gwynne's exhilarating account delivers a sweeping narrative that encompasses Spanish colonialism, the Civil War, the destruction of the buffalo herds, and the arrival of the railroads--a historical feast for anyone interested in how the United States came into being. Against this backdrop Gwynne presents the compelling drama of Cynthia Ann Parker, a lovely nine-year-old girl with cornflower-blue eyes who was kidnapped by Comanches from the far Texas frontier in 1836. She grew to love her captors and became infamous as the "White Squaw" who refused to return until her tragic capture by Texas Rangers in 1860. More famous still was her son Quanah, a warrior who was never defeated and whose guerrilla wars in the Texas Panhandle made him a legend. S. C. Gwynne's account of these events is meticulously researched, intellectually provocative, and, above all, thrillingly told. Empire of the Summer Moon announces him as a major new writer of American history.

Quicklet on S. C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon (CliffsNotes-like Book Summary)

Author: Fraser Sherman
Publisher: Hyperink Inc
ISBN: 1614641730
Category : Study Aids
Languages : en
Pages : 34

Book Description
ABOUT THE BOOK “It seemed implausible that the westward rush of Anglo-European civilization would stall in the prairies of central Texas.” – S.C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon S.C. Gwynne first became interested in the Comanches while reading Walter Prescott Webb’s The Great Plains. Webb mentioned in one chapter that the Comanche tribes had been a barrier to white settlement, something Gwynne, a northerner, had never heard of. Intrigued, he began reading more books about the tribe, such as T.R. Fehrenbach’s Comanche: The Destruction of a People. After moving to Texas in the 1990s, Gwynne discovered that the Lone Star State still remembered the Indian Wars. “A woman might tell me that her great-grandparents were both killed by Comanches,” Gwynne told the Historynet website. “This happened to me a lot.” (Interview with author S.C. Gwynne) Gwynne’s research convinced him there hadn’t been a significant book about the Comanches since Fehrenbach’s 1974 history. Having already written two nonfiction books, he decided to make the Comanches the subject of his third. He reasoned that if he found their history exciting and novel, other non-Texans, including New York editors, would have the same reaction. (Interview with author S. C. Gwynne) MEET THE AUTHOR Fraser Sherman was born in England and is now happily living in Durham, NC. He has 15 years experience as a reporter, 20 published fantasy/SF stories and is also the author of three film reference books. EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK They rejected conventional pitched battles in favor of the swift attacks the Comanche employed, and with this strategy won repeatedly. Over the next few decades, Texas forgot everything the Rangers had learned about Indian fighting. Texas and the United States fell back on traditional military tactics and peace negotiations. Negotiating with the Comanche never worked: the tribe’s warriors broke treaties and promises time and again, then came back and offered to renegotiate. By the 1860s, cholera, smallpox and other European diseases had crippled many Comanche tribes. Nevertheless, the remaining tribesmen remained formidable and their attacks actually pushed the frontier back east. Then, the United States government decided to give up on negotiations. In 1871 Army sent Col Ranald Mackenzie, a Civil War veteran, to lead cavalry into the plains and hunt down the remaining Comanche. Over the next four years, Quanah Parker’s Indian warriors and Mackenzie’s troops clashed repeatedly, with the cavalry ultimately gaining the upper hand. Parker surrendered in 1875 – the Comanches’ days as buffalo hunters and raiders were over. Parker adapted fast and well to civilization. Comanches had never cared for property, except horses, but Quanah Parker became a successful businessman and a prosperous landowner. Parker founded a school district for Comanche students. He also promoted the Peyote rituals that became the basis of the Native American Church. He died in 1911, of heart failure.... Buy a copy to keep reading!

The Kings of Big Spring

Author: Bryan Mealer
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1250058937
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Book Description
"Think of it as a Texas version of Hillbilly Elegy." — Bryan Burrough, New York Times bestselling author of THE BIG RICH and BARBARIANS AT THE GATE "Bryan Mealer has given us a brilliant, and brilliantly entertaining, portrayal of family, and a bursting-at-the-seams chunk of America in the bargain.” — Ben Fountain, bestselling author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk A saga of family, fortune, faith in Texas, where blood is bond and oil is king... In 1892, Bryan Mealer’s great-grandfather leaves the Georgia mountains and heads west into Texas, looking for wealth and adventure in the raw and open country. But his luck soon runs out. Beset by drought, the family loses their farm just as the dead pastures around them give way to one of the biggest oil booms in American history. They eventually settle in the small town of Big Spring, where fast fortunes are being made from its own reserves of oil. For the next two generations, the Mealers live on the margins of poverty, laboring in the cotton fields and on the drilling rigs that sprout along the flatland, weathering dust and wind, booms and busts, and tragedies that scatter them like tumbleweed. After embracing Pentecostalism during the Great Depression, they rely heavily on their faith to steel them against hardship and despair. But for young Bobby Mealer, the author’s father, religion is only an agent for rebellion. In the winter of 1981, when the author is seven years old, Bobby receives a call from an old friend with a simple question, “How'd you like to be a millionaire?” Twenty-six, and with a wife and three kids, Bobby had left his hometown to seek a life removed from the blowing dust and oil fields, and to find spiritual peace. But now Big Spring’s streets are flooded again with roughnecks, money, and sin. Boom chasers pour in from the busted factory towns in the north. Drilling rigs rise like timber along the pastures, and poor men become millionaires overnight. Grady Cunningham, Bobby's friend, is one of the newly-minted kings of Big Spring. Loud and flamboyant, with a penchant for floor-length fur coats, Grady pulls Bobby and his young wife into his glamorous orbit. While drilling wells for Grady's oil company, they fly around on private jets and embrace the honky-tonk high life of Texas oilmen. But beneath the Rolexes and Rolls Royce cars is a reality as dark as the crude itself. As Bobby soon discovers, his return to Big Spring is a backslider’s journey into a spiritual wilderness, and one that could cost him his life. A masterwork of memoir and narrative history, The Kings of Big Spring is an indelible portrait of fortune and ruin as big as Texas itself. And in telling the story of four generations of his family, Mealer also tells the story of America came to be.

1847

Author: Turtle Bunbury
Publisher: Gill & Macmillan Ltd
ISBN: 0717168433
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 535

Book Description
Capture the spirit of an industrial, social and cultural revolution through this invigorating collection of historical portraits from the dawn of the industrialised world!Though it feels like an era marooned almost irretrievably in the distant past, the 1840s &ndash a decade of blistering social and cultural change – is only two lifetimes removed from the present day. There are, in other words, people alive today who knew and associated with people for whom the Gold Rush and the Great Famine were living memories.Having grown up in an Irish country house built that year, 1847 has long proven the source of inspiration and fascination for historian Turtle Bunbury. And in a bid to once more grasp the spirit of the age, he has over the years assembled an archive of the most remarkable stories from those twelve momentous months.Bristling with all manner of human life and endeavour, from American pioneers and German entrepreneurs to circus charlatans and down-and-out songwriters, 1847 is a collection of his most remarkable discoveries to date and a stirring portrait of a chaotic world surging towards the modern. By turns poignant, outlandish, curious and provocative, this is history at its most invigorating – as panorama, as epic.Praise for The Glorious Madness:'An absolutely brilliant book.'Patrick Geoghegan, Associate Professor in History at Trinity College, Dublin'Turtle Bunbury's open-handed, clear-sighted and finely written book comes fresh and, I might almost say, redeemed out of the moil and storm of controversy that surrounded the topic of the war, in a thousand different guises in the decades since its end. Turtle holds out his hand in the present, seeking the lost hands of the past, in darkness, in darkness, but also suddenly in the clear light of kindness – in the upshot acknowledging their imperilled existence with a brilliant flourish, a veritable banner, of wonderful stories.'Sebastian Barry, author of The Secret Scripture'Turtle continues the wonderful listening and yarn-spinning he has honed in the Vanishing Ireland series, applying it to veterans of the First World War. The stories he recreates are poignant, whimsical and bleakly funny, bringing back into the light the lives of people who found themselves on the wrong side of history after the struggle for Irish independence. This is my kind of micro-history.'John Grenham, The Irish TimesPraise for Vanishing Ireland:'A perfect symbiosis between text and images – both similarity affectionate, respectful, humorous, slightly melancholic but never sentimental or nostalgic. This is invaluable social history.'Cara Magazine'This is a beautiful and remarkably simple book that will melt the hardest of hearts. Bunbury has a light writing style that lets his interviewees, elderly folk from around the country, tell their stories without interference. It's neither patronising nor overly romantic about the past; just narrating moving tales – The portraits by Fennell are striking, warm and dignified, with a feeling of being invited into people's lives.'The Sunday Times

Cinematic Comanches

Author: Dustin Tahmahkera
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803286880
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
Cinematic Comanches engages in a description and critical appraisal of Indigenous hype, visual representation, and audience reception of Comanche culture and history through the 2013 Disney film The Lone Ranger.

The History of the Desloge Family in America

Author: Christopher Desloge
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1304244067
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
The Desloge family in America is known as a great industrialist, philanthropic, religious and naturalist family spanning 200 years in America and is one of the oldest French families in Missouri and St. Louis. It has taken the vital force and verve of great families to build great business in America; and build a country of increasing middle-class consumers as well. Tycoons like Carnegie, Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Gould and Morgan - greats of the gilded age have made a real impression on industry and the increase in the human condition from those industries. Other families have made their mark in much the same way - such as Kellogg and Wrigley. Steel, railroads, finance, cereal, chewing gum. In lead, the name is Desloge. Starting with entrepreneurial zeal by wildcatting in mining in Missouri and also in the California Gold Rush, among these famous names, the Desloge family became - and today represents - industrial and social titans in Missouri and American history.

The Art of War

Author: Jonathan Clements
Publisher: Constable
ISBN: 1780331312
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 81

Book Description
A new translation for the 21st century. The Art of War by Sun Tzu is one of the most influential political and business books of our era. This gateway edition for the 21st century reader rediscovers the essential clarity of the ancient masterpiece, cited by generals from a dozen Chinese dynasties, international business leaders, and modern military field manuals. This edition also contains a full commentary on Sun Tzu, the man and his ideas, contemporary of Confucius and Buddha; and a critical guide to further reading. This is the perfect introduction to one of the world's best-known classics.

The Readers' Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction, Third Edition

Author: Neal Wyatt
Publisher: American Library Association
ISBN: 083891781X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Book Description
Everyone’s favorite guide to fiction that’s thrilling, mysterious, suspenseful, thought-provoking, romantic, and just plain fun is back—and better than ever in this completely revamped and revised edition. A must for every readers’ advisory desk, this resource is also a useful tool for collection development librarians and students in LIS programs. Inside, RA experts Wyatt and Saricks cover genres such as Psychological Suspense, Horror, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Romance, Mystery, Literary and Historical Fiction, and introduce the concepts of Adrenaline and Relationship Fiction; include everything advisors need to get up to speed on a genre, including its appeal characteristics, key authors, sure bets, and trends; demonstrate how genres overlap and connect, plus suggestions for guiding readers among genres; and tie genre fiction to the whole collection, including nonfiction, audiobooks, graphic novels, film and TV, poetry, and games. Both insightful and comprehensive, this matchless guidebook will help librarians become familiar with many different fiction genres, especially those they do not regularly read, and aid library staff in connecting readers to books they’re sure to love.

The Second Colorado Cavalry

Author: Christopher M. Rein
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806166908
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
During the Civil War, the Second Colorado Volunteer Regiment played a vital and often decisive role in the fight for the Union on the Great Plains—and in the westward expansion of the American empire. Christopher M. Rein’s The Second Colorado Cavalry is the first in-depth history of this regiment operating at the nexus of the Civil War and the settlement of the American West. Composed largely of footloose ’59ers who raced west to participate in the gold rush in Colorado, the troopers of the Second Colorado repelled Confederate invasions in New Mexico and Indian Territory before wading into the Burned District along the Kansas border, the bloodiest region of the guerilla war in Missouri. In 1865, the regiment moved back out onto the plains, applying what it had learned to peacekeeping operations along the Santa Fe Trail, thus definitively linking the Civil War and the military conquest of the American West in a single act of continental expansion. Emphasizing the cavalry units, whose mobility proved critical in suppressing both Confederate bushwhackers and Indian raiders, Rein tells the neglected tale of the “fire brigade” of the Trans-Mississippi Theater—a group of men, and a few women, who enabled the most significant environmental shift in the Great Plains’ history: the displacement of Native Americans by Euro-American settlers, the swapping of bison herds for fenced cattle ranges, and the substitution of iron horses for those of flesh and bone. The Second Colorado Cavalry offers us a much-needed history of the “guerilla hunters” who helped suppress violence and keep the peace in contested border regions; it adds nuance and complexity to our understanding of the unlikely “agents of empire” who successfully transformed the Central Plains.

Wild by Nature

Author: Andrea L. Smalley
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421422352
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

Book Description
"Wild by Nature answers the question: how did indigenous animals shape the course of colonization in English America? The book argues that animals acted as obstacles to colonization because their wildness was at odds with Anglo-American legal assertions of possession. Animals and their pursuers transgressed the legal lines officials drew to demarcate colonizers' sovereignty and control over the landscape. Consequently, wild creatures became legal actors in the colonizing process--the subjects of statutes, the issues in court cases, and the parties to treaties--as authorities struggled to both contain and preserve the wildness that made those animals so valuable to English settler societies in North America in the first place. Only after wild creatures were brought under the state's legal ownership and control could the land be rationally organized and possessed. The book examines the colonization of American animals as a separate strand interwoven into a larger story of English colonizing in North America. As such, it proceeds along a different and longer timeline than other colonial histories, tracing a path through various wild animal frontiers from the seventeenth-century Chesapeake into the southern backcountry in the eighteenth century and across the Appalachians in the early nineteenth to end in the southern plains in the decades after the Civil War. Along the way, it maps out an argumentative arc that describes three manifestations of colonization as it variously applied to beavers, wolves, fish, deer, and bison. Wild by Nature engages broad questions about the environment, law, and society in early America"--