Nothing Like It In the World

Nothing Like It In the World

Author: Stephen E. Ambrose

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2001-11-06

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 9780743203173

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The story of the men who build the transcontinental railroad in the 1860's.


An Overland Journey

An Overland Journey

Author: Horace Greeley

Publisher:

Published: 2017-04-12

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9783744762069

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An Overland Journey - From New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859 is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1860. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future.


Literary Location and Dislocation of Myth in the Post/Colonial Anglophone World

Literary Location and Dislocation of Myth in the Post/Colonial Anglophone World

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-11-01

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 9004361405

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The English-speaking world today is so diverse that readers need a gateway to its many postcolonial narratives and art forms. This collection of essays examines this diver¬sity and what brings so many different cul¬tures together. Whether Indian, Canadian, Australasian or Zimbabwean, the stories dis¬cussed focus on how artists render experi¬ences of separation, belonging, and loss. The histories and transformations postcolonial countries have gone through have given rise to a wide range of myths that retrace their birth, evolution, and decline. Myths have enabled ethnic communities to live together; the first section of this collection dwells on stories, which can be both inclusive and exclusive, under the aegis of ‘nation’. While certain essays revisit and retell the crucial role women have played in mythical texts like the Mahābhārata, others discuss how settler colonies return to and re-appro¬priate a past in order to define themselves in the present. Crises, clashes, and conflicts, which are at the heart of the second section of this book, entail myths of historical and cultural dislocation. They appear as breaks in time that call for reconstruction and redefini¬tion, a chief instance being the trauma of slavery, with its deep geographical and cul¬tural dislocations. However, the crises that have deprived entire communities of their homeland and their identity are followed by moments of remembrance, reconciliation, and rebuilding. As the term ‘postcolonial’ sug¬gests, the formerly colonized people seek to revisit and re-investigate the impact of colo¬nization before committing it to collective memory. In a more specifically literary sec¬tion, texts are read as mythopoeia, fore¬grounding the aesthetic and poetic issues in colonial and postcolonial poems and novels. The texts explored here study in different ways the process of mytho¬logization through images of location and dislocation. The editors of this collection hope that readers worldwide will enjoy reading about the myths that have shaped and continue to shape postcolonial communities and nations. CONTRIBUTORS Elara Bertho, Dúnlaith Bird, Marie–Christine Blin, Jaine Chemmachery, André Dodeman, Biljana Đorić Francuski, Frédéric Dumas, Daniel Karlin, Sabine Lauret–Taft, Anne Le Guellec–Minel, Élodie Raimbault, Winfried Siemerling, Laura Singeot, Françoise Storey, Jeff Storey, Christine Vandamme


Desert Between the Mountains

Desert Between the Mountains

Author: Michael S. Durham

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2014-01-28

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 1466863218

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On July 24, 1847, a band of Mormon pioneers descended into the Salt Lake Valley. Having crossed the Great Plains and hauled their wagons over the Rocky Mountains, they believed that their long search for a permanent home had finally come to an end. The valley was an arid and inhospitable place, but to them it was Zion. They settled on the edge of an immense, uncharted, and self-contained region covering over 220,000 square miles, or one-fifteenth of the area of the United States. The early-nineteenth-century explorer John Charles Fremont had just aptly named this region the Great Basin because its lakes and rivers have no outlet to the sea: its waters course down the mountains and disappear into the desert. Here, in a land that few others wanted, the Mormons hoped to live and worship in peace. Within ten years of their arrival, the Mormons had established nineteen communities, extending all the way to San Diego, California--a remarkable feat of colonization and one of the great successes of the westward movement. Desert Between the Mountains is by no means, however, a story of splendid and stoic isolation. Beginning with an explanation of the Great Basin's unique and enigmatic topography, Michael S. Durham delineates the region as a crucible for a complex and exciting narrative history. Tales of nomadic Indian tribes, Spanish ecclesiastics, intrepid furtrappers, and adventurous early explorers are brilliantly and thoroughly chronicled. Moreover, Durham depicts the Mormon way of life under the constant strain from its interaction with miners, soldiers, mountain men, the Pony Express, railroad builders, federal officials, and an assortment of other so-called Gentiles. Durham vigorously explores the dynamics of this important chapter of American history, capturing its epic sweep, its near biblical mayhem, and its unforgettable characters in an illuminating and provocative account. Desert Between the Mountains concludes with the joining of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory, Utah, in 1869, an event that marked the end of the pioneer era. This is a dramatic, multifaceted, and definitive study of the Great Basin, demonstrating, for the first time, that it is a region unified in its history as well as its geography--that today includes all of Nevada, most of Utah, and parts of five other surrounding states.


Green Russell and Gold

Green Russell and Gold

Author: Elma Dill Russell Spencer

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2014-04-21

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0292766025

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The family history of the Russells of Georgia is a saga of the Westward Movement during the middle fifty years of the nineteenth century. The "Russell boys," as prospectors and miners, moved with the frontier as it followed fresh discoveries of gold, from Georgia to California to Colorado. Then, after the interlude of the Civil War, they settled in the new territories, turning their abilities and ruggedness of character to the development of careers on other frontiers—ranching, farming, land development, medicine—in Montana, Colorado, and Texas. Elma Dill Russell Spencer, a descendant of one of these unusual brothers, relates their story as she learned it from family tradition transmitted by Grandma Russell, from family letters, from public documents, and from historical accounts of the exciting era. The reader of her narrative sees the evolution of Western society in the vast wasteland of mountain and prairie from the viewpoint of the people who were making history, people too engrossed in their own problems to realize the far-reaching significance of their achievement. The reader sees the struggle to wrest gold from the streams and hills with primitive tools and techniques; the development of tent villages into populous towns affording most of the comforts of the East; the evolution of a code of mining laws, of protection from violence and crime; the building of schools; the emergence of sectional problems and divided loyalties; the Civil War, mostly through noncombatants' eyes; the progressive changes in transportation, until the railroads tied the West to the East. The reader also encounters Indians, who ride in and out of these pages, and other fascinating types of characters associated with "the wild, varied, and always unpredictable" frontier. The odyssey of the Russell brothers as they struggle home to Georgia from Union-sympathizing Denver is particularly full of action, with tense moments in the account of narrowly escaped death—at the hands of Indians, through the ravages of disease, and from the enmity of Yankee foes. This book was originally published as Gold Country in 1958; the University of Texas Press edition was completely revised and first published in 1966.


Brigham Young

Brigham Young

Author: Leonard J. Arrington

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2012-06-12

Total Pages: 562

ISBN-13: 0345803388

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Brigham Young comes to life in this superlative biography that presents him as a Mormon leader, a business genius, a family man, a political organizer, and a pioneer of the West. Drawing on a vast range of sources, including documents, personal diaries, and private correspondence, Leonard J. Arrington brings Young to life as a towering yet fully human figure, the remarkable captain of his people and his church for thirty years, who combined piety and the pursuit of power to leave an indelible stamp on Mormon society and the culture of the Western frontier. From polygamy to the Mountain Meadows Massacre to the attempted preservation of Young’s Great Basin Kingdom, we are given a fresh understanding of the controversies that plagued Young in his contentious relations with the federal government. Brigham Young draws its subject out of the marginal place in history to which the conventional wisdom has assigned him, and sets him squarely in the American mainstream, a figure of abiding influence in our society to this day.


Horace Greeley

Horace Greeley

Author: Robert C. Williams

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2006-05

Total Pages: 562

ISBN-13: 0814794025

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A major figure in nineteenth-century American politics and reform movements, Greeley was also a key actor in a worldwide debate about the meaning of freedom that involved progressive thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic, including Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Karl Marx." "In the first comprehensive biography of Greeley to be published in nearly half a century, Williams captures Greeley from all sides: editor, reformer, political candidate, eccentric, and trans-Atlantic public intellectual; examining headlining news issues of the day, including slavery, westward expansion, European revolutions, the Civil War, the demise of the Whig and the birth of the Republican parties, transcendentalism, and other intellectual currents of the era."


A Great and Shining Road

A Great and Shining Road

Author: John Hoyt Williams

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 1996-01-01

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 9780803297890

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The Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads were officially joined on May 10, 1869 at Promontory Point, Utah, with the driving of a golden spike. This historic ceremony marked the completion of the first transcontinental railroad. Spanning the Sierras and the “Great American Desert,” the tracks connected San Francisco to Council Bluffs, Iowa. A Great and Shining Road is the exciting story of a mammoth feat that called forth entrepreneurial daring, financial wizardry, technological innovation, political courage and chicanery, and the heroism of thousands of laborers.