States and the Nation

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Latest release: August 17, 2000
Series
15
Books

About this ebook series

Those who travel to look at Colorado will find as much meaning in Marshall Sprague’s well-told story of its historical conflict as will those who live with the beauty—and the challenge.

Mountains—so beautiful, the land dominated by the Colorado Rockies, that miners who “thought of returning to the comfort and dull security of their homes back east,” in Marshall Sprague’s words, “found themselves held by the appeal of their giddy environment, the spaciousness, the violence and serenity of the climate, the brightness of stars and the gorgeous sunups.” The beauty itself could encourage a miner’s belief that surely his luck would turn.
Colorado: A History
Book 0 · Jan 1984 ·
0.0
Those who travel to look at Colorado will find as much meaning in Marshall Sprague’s well-told story of its historical conflict as will those who live with the beauty—and the challenge. Mountains—so beautiful, the land dominated by the Colorado Rockies, that miners who “thought of returning to the comfort and dull security of their homes back east,” in Marshall Sprague’s words, “found themselves held by the appeal of their giddy environment, the spaciousness, the violence and serenity of the climate, the brightness of stars and the gorgeous sunups.” The beauty itself could encourage a miner’s belief that surely his luck would turn.
West Virginia: A History
Book 0 · Aug 1984 ·
0.0
John Alexander Williams's West Virginia: A History is widely considered one of the finest books ever written about the state. In his clear, eminently readable style, Williams organizes the tangled strands of West Virginia's past around a few dramatic events—the battle of Point Pleasant, John Brown's insurrection in Harper's Ferry, the Paint Creek labor movement, the Hawk's Nest and Buffalo Creek disasters, and more. Williams uses these pivotal events as introductions to the larger issues of statehood, Civil War, unionism, and industrialization. Along the way, Williams conveys a true feel for the lives of common West Virginians, the personalities of the state's memorable characters, and the powerful influence of the land itself on its own history.
Wyoming: A Bicentennial History
Book 0 · Aug 1977 ·
0.0
For centuries Wyoming was a land no one wanted--high, dry, and remote--more often a thoroughfare on the way to some place else than a final destination. Many of the sweeping developments that overtook the rest of the nation simply passed it by, leaving Wyoming to sit in lonely grandeur behind its granite walls and silent snows. The problem, explains T.A. Larson in this history, was people--and how to get them there.

The settlers who came to Wyoming stayed to build a special way of life. It is with them that important choices now rest. "The country where the wind blew in primeval purity will now breathe new odors," says author Larson, unless short-term profits can be balanced by long-term gains. If the right decisions are made, he concludes, it should be possible for Wyoming to "emerge from its primitive isolation in such a way that its greatest values are preserved and its old way of life left for those who choose to follow it." 

Michigan: A Bicentennial History (States and the Nation)
Book 0 · Apr 1976 ·
0.0
The late Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian Bruce Catton is known to millions of readers for his absorbing works on the Civil War. In this book, he turns to his native Michigan to tell a story of what happened when a primitive wilderness changed into a bustling industrial center so fast that it was as if the old French explorer Etienne Brule "should step up to shake hands with Henry Ford."

The idea that abundance was "inexhaustible--that fatal Michigan word," as the author calls it--dominated thinking about the state from the days when Commandant Cadillac's soldiers arrived at Detroit until his name became a brand of car. Viewed in this light, Michigan is a case study of all America, and Americans in any state will be fascinated. In a colorful, dramatic past, Mr. Catton finds understanding of where we are in the present and what the future will make us face. 

Minnesota: A History (Second Edition) (States and the Nation): Edition 2
Book 0 · Aug 2000 ·
0.0
A comprehensive history of a state thought by many to be the most livable. In this volume, William Lass tells the story of Minnesota, a state that evolved from many cultures, from its beginnings to the present. This history not only provides descriptions of the essential events of Minnesota's past but also offers an interpretation of major trends and characteristics of the state and its distinctiveness within the context of the nation's story.
Mississippi: A Bicentennial History (States and the Nation)
Book 0 · Apr 1979 ·
5.0
What life has really been like for most Mississippians is the story told in this intriguing history. To many Americans, Mississippi means Natchez and Vicksburg, white columns and cotton. For the people who have lived there, however, Mississippi has been a decidedly different place. Depending on who you were, and where and when you lived, Mississippi could be a much worse or far better place than that portrayed by its romantic image.
Montana: A Bicentennial History (States and the Nation)
Book 0 · Jun 1978 ·
0.0
At three times the size of Pennsylvania, with a county bigger than the whole state of Connecticut, Montana is a large place, once described as "bounded on the west by the Japan current, on the north by the aurora borealis, on the south by Price's Army, and on the east by the Day of Judgement." Montana has a rich story, in which different people have sought both great fortune and modest prosperity. How well they succeeded is part of the story told in this engaging history.
Nevada: A Bicentennial History (States and the Nation)
Book 0 · Aug 1977 ·
0.0
Sagebrush and neon, shepherds and gangsters, a crossroads and a refuge, Nevada is a state that "didn't deserve to be." Through a turbulent history, Nevada has searched for an identity to call its own. How well it has succeeded is the subject of Robert Laxalt's evocative portrait of the state and its people.
New Jersey (States and the Nation)
Book 0 · Aug 1984 ·
0.0
When members of the colonial assembly warned Governor Philip Carteret in 1668 that he should abandon any expectations "that things must go according to your opinions," they struck a keynote for the New Jersey experience and suggested to author Thomas Fleming what perhaps should have been the state's motto: "Divided We Stand."

Ethnic diversity made New Jersey an early testing ground for the melting pot, as Yankees, Irish, Italians, and blacks strove for a chance at the good life. To many, that meant a job in the factories that made the state an industrial pioneer; to others, it meant life on the farms that made New Jersey truly the "Garden State."Mr. Fleming concludes that today New Jersey may be in the vanguard of a new American way of life, "the first metropolitan state with equally convenient access to cities and to countryside." He foresees an "equally-oriented New Jersey, honestly and efficiently governed," reminding the nation that divisiveness and acrimony can have more than one outcome. After all, New Jerseyites may have voted repeatedly for the "Boss of Bosses," Frank Hague, but they also once chose as their governor a Princeton professor named Woodrow Wilson. 

New York: A Bicentennial History (States and the Nation)
Book 0 · Mar 1981 ·
0.0
From the Big Apple to Niagara Falls, the state of New York has always had enormous fascination for Americans. From the Empire State have come major influences on almost every aspect of American life. Particularly advantageous landforms and waterways enabled the explorers and settlers and entrepreneurs of early New York to move ahead of others, and the strategic location of New York City with its outstanding harbor also helped the state reach dominance. But as the author of this book shows, almost from the beginning on the tip of Manhattan Island, New York has benefited from the varied talents of successive influxes of diverse ethnic and racial groups. In conflict though they often were, they have also been a source of hte state's cultural richness and economic strength.
Ohio: A Bicentennial History (States and the Nation)
Book 0 · Nov 1976 ·
0.0
Historically, Ohio seems to have had everything--great physical beauty; rich resources of coal, oil, gas, and fertile soil; a central location with easy means of transportation by land and water; inventive and dynamic people; and the kind of national political influence that wealth and a large population can give a state. It was no accident that eight of the nation's presidents had an Ohio connection.

In character, the first Ohioans exhibited qualities that seemed typical of Americans in general. "The spirit of the place was large, vigorous, and buoyant," Walter Havighurst writes of the colorful early days when settlers attached forests with ax and fire. "Keep the ball rolling" and "Give it a try" became Ohio slogans as boosterism surged, fields were planted, towns were founded, and canals were dug. Steamboats, steel plants, and the rubber industry brought growth to Cleveland, Cincinnati, and other major cities, making Ohio a commercial and industrial as well as an agricultural heartland.

Rhode Island: A History (States and the Nation)
Book 0 · Jun 1986 ·
0.0
With a Historical Guide prepared by the editors of the American Association for State and Local History. High atop the Rhode Island capitol in Providence, a bronze likeness of "The Independent Man" keeps watch over a state that historically has put the ideal of individual liberty before all others. Like many ideals, this one was freighted with many meanings. As the colony grew in the seventeenth century, the belief in religious liberty and freedom of conscience espoused by its founder, Roger Williams, led to the development of political liberty and practical democracy. In the eighteenth century, that dedication to individualism made Rhode Islanders into businessmen of the first order, willing to take the big risk in hope of a bigger reward. Their land being poor in natural resources, Rhode Islanders turned to trade; accumulating wealth from traffic in rum and slaves, they built in Newport and Providence small but elegant copies of Georgian England, and worried more about taxes and currency than about religion. When they felt poorly served by British policies, they became ready revolutionaries and led in the founding of a new nation. After the Civil War, their children took individual liberty to mean economic laissez-faire, ushering in the state's golden age when Rhode Island senator Nelson Aldrich became known as the "general manager" of the United States.

Through countless changes in the twentieth century, the ideal still survives and asks old questions of new generations of Rhode Islanders from many ethnic backgrounds: How best to reconcile the rights of minorities with the rule of the majority, and how best to secure the individual liberty and economic opportunity that Roger Williams and Moses Brown would have understood so well?
South Carolina: A Bicentennial History (States and the Nation)
Book 0 · Feb 1976 ·
0.0
Louis Wright's masterful telling of South Carolina's story will fascinate residents and non-residents alike. A land whose people knew the joy of great victories and the sadness of bitter defeats, South Carolina gave us the first Americans cowboys, the cotton gin, and a long list of colorful military and political figures, from Swamp-Fox Marion to Pitchfork Ben Tillman and Cotton Ed Smith. Louis Wright's masterful telling of the story will fascinate residents and non-residents alike.
Texas: A History
Book 0 · May 1984 ·
0.0
Texas is blood and violence, right? It is cowboys and longhorns, the Alamo and the Astrodome, wheeling and dealing and bragging, right?

Right. And also wrong, says the author of this book, Joe B. Frantz. This is the story of how a myth began, with the Texas Revolution against Mexico, cattle drives, and "hyperactive" Texas Rangers, and became embodied in larger-than-life figures, from Sam Houston to "Speaker Sam" Rayburn, from the explorer La Salle to L. B. J. It is also the story of a state larger than its myth, a Confederate state that contained enclaves of pro-Union German-Americans, a football-loving state that produced musicians of the sensitivity of Scott Joplin and Van Cliburn, a western state that also is Southern, Mexican, and Spanish in its influences.
Missouri: A Bicentennial History (States and the Nation)
Book 0 · Aug 1977 ·
0.0
Missourians could hardly have made a more appropriate decision than to name their capital city after Thomas Jefferson. A meeting-place of major rivers, Missouri became a gateway to the promised land--the beckoning West opened up to Americans by Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase.  In the era of overland traders and steamboat pilots, of Thomas Hart Benton and Mark Twain, life in Missouri was strongly flavored by the Jeffersonian spirit, expressed in a suspicion of large cities, a belief that mankind flourished best in a rural setting, and a faith in the free individual as the guardian of liberty.