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
A journalist chronicles his Texas family’s century-long saga of faith and fortune seeking in this acclaimed memoir: “a Texas version of Hillbilly Elegy” (Bryan Burrough, author of Barbarians at the Gate). In 1892, Bryan Mealer’s great-grandfather leaves Georgia to seek his fortune in the open country of Texas. But the family soon loses their farm to drought just as the region experiences one of the biggest oil booms in American history. They eventually settle in the small town of Big Spring, where fast oil fortunes are being made. For the next two generations, the Mealers labor in cotton fields and on drilling rigs, weathering booms and busts. During the Great Depression, they ward off despair by embracing Pentecostalism. But for young Bobby Mealer, the author’s father, the search for spiritual peace leads him to a rebellious move away from Big Spring. Then in 1981, Bobby’s old friend Grady Cunningham entices him back home with the promise of millions. While drilling wells for Grady’s oil company, Bobby and his wife embrace the honky-tonk high life. But beneath the Rolexes and private jets 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.

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.

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

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 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.

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"--

These Ragged Edges

Author: Andrew J. Torget
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469668408
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 407

Book Description
The U.S.-Mexico border has earned an enduring reputation as a site of violence. During the past twenty years in particular, the drug wars—fueled by the international movement of narcotics and vast sums of money—have burned an abiding image of the border as a place of endemic danger into the consciousness of both countries. By the media, popular culture, and politicians, mayhem and brutality are often portrayed as the unavoidable birthright of this transnational space. Through multiple perspectives from both sides of the border, the collected essays in These Ragged Edges directly challenge that idea, arguing that rapidly changing conditions along the U.S.-Mexico border through the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries have powerfully shaped the ebb and flow of conflict within the region. By diving deeply into diverse types of violence, contributors dissect the roots and consequences of border violence across numerous eras, offering a transnational analysis of how and why violence has affected the lives of so many inhabitants on both sides of the border. Contributors include Alberto Barrera-Enderle, Alice Baumgartner, Lance R. Blyth, Timothy Bowman, Elaine Carey, William D. Carrigan, Jose Carlos Cisneros Guzman, Alejandra Diaz de Leon, Miguel Angel Gonzalez-Quiroga, Santiago Ivan Guerra, Gerardo Gurza-Lavalle, Sonia Hernandez, Alan Knight, Jose Gabriel Martinez-Serna, Brandon Morgan, and Joaquin Rivaya-Martinez, Andrew J. Torget, and Clive Webb.

The Case Against Military Intervention

Author: Donald M. Snow
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317501764
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
Since World War II, military intervention in developing world internal conflicts (DWIC) has become the primary form of U.S. military activity, and these interventions have proven unsuccessful in places like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. This book argues such failure was entirely predictable, even inevitable, due both to the nature and dynamics of foreign military intrusion in the affairs of other countries and especially the DWICs that provide the major contemporary form of potential U.S. military in the foreseeable future. Basing its analysis in both human nature (the adverse reaction to prolonged outsider intrusion) and historical analogy, the book argues strongly why military intervention should be avoided as a national security option and the implications of such a policy decision for national security strategy and policy.