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The uncovering in the mid-1700s of fossilized mastodon bones and teeth at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, signaled the beginning of a great American adventure. The West was opening up and unexplored lands beckoned. Unimagined paleontological treasures awaited discovery: strange horned mammals, birds with teeth, flying reptiles, gigantic fish, diminutive ancestors of horses and camels, and more than a hundred different kinds of dinosaurs. This exciting book tells the story of the grandest period of fossil discovery in American history, the years from 1750 to 1890. The volume begins with Thomas Jefferson, whose keen interest in the American mastodon led him to champion the study of fossil vertebrates...
When people today hear “paleontology,” they immediately think of dinosaurs. But for much of the history of the discipline, dramatic demonstrations of the history of life focused on the developmental history of mammals. The Age of Mammals examines how nineteenth-century scholars, writers, artists, and public audiences understood the animals they regarded as being at the summit of life. For them, mammals were crucial for understanding the formation (and possibly the future) of the natural world. Yet, as Chris Manias reveals, this combined with more troubling notions: that seemingly promising creatures had been swept aside in the “struggle for life,” or that modern biodiversity was impo...
Even among iconic frontiersmen like John C. Frémont, Kit Carson, and Jedediah Smith, Jim Bridger stands out. A mountain man of the American West, straddling the fur trade era and the age of exploration, he lived the life legends are made of. His adventures are fit for remaking into the tall tales Bridger himself liked to tell. Here, in a biography that finally gives this outsize character his due, Jerry Enzler takes this frontiersman’s full measure for the first time—and tells a story that would do Jim Bridger proud. Born in 1804 and orphaned at thirteen, Bridger made his first western foray in 1822, traveling up the Missouri River with Mike Fink and a hundred enterprising young men to ...
The history of Fort Bridger represents a microcosm of the development of the American West. Situated in an area initially inhabited by the Shoshone people, Fort Bridger was established during a transitional phase between the fur-trade era and the period of western migration. The fort became one of the most important supply points along the nation's western trail network. Later, the post served as a bastion of civilization as one of a number of western military posts. Soldiers at the fort protected not only the lives and property of its local citizenry but also the emerging transportation and communication advancements of a nation. Following the Army's departure, a small settlement emerged at Fort Bridger, using buildings and materials from the old military garrison. Today, the fort and town remain active, in part as a respite for travelers just as it had been more than 150 years ago.
People of the Wind River, the first book-length history of the Eastern Shoshones, tells the tribe's story through eight tumultuous decades -- from 1825, when they reached mutual accommodation with the first permanent white settlers in Wind River country, to 1900, when the death of Chief Washakie marked a final break with their traditional lives as nineteenth-century Plains Indians. Henry E. Stamm, IV, draws on extensive research in primary documents, including Indian agency records, letters, newspapers, church archives, and tax accounts, and on interviews with descendants of early Shoshone leaders. He describes the creation of the Eastern political division of the tribe and its migration fro...
It was an age of counterfeit giants, corrupt politicians, and intrepid pioneers. It was a time of scientific ferment. The second half of the 19th century — the so-called Gilded Age — was a time when Americans were exploring the West and building a nation which stretched from coast to coast. It was also when scientists began finding dinosaur fossils across the western half of the nation. Could the answer to the history of life and the proof of evolution be found in these bones? That was the question two young American paleontologists — Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh — set out to answer. But what began as a friendly contest quickly turned into a bitter rivalry that would spill over into American science and politics and rage relentlessly for nearly three decades. Despite their Gilded Age celebrity, the names of Cope and Marsh have disappeared into the recesses of the library and archive. InThe Gilded Dinosaur, Mark Jaffe exhumes from those archives the notes, journals, and letters of these two great opponents to reanimate and retell one of the most fierce rivalries in the history of science.
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