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New Seeds of Profit
When Captain Christopher Newport and his crew landed on the muddy banks of the James River in 1607, after four months at sea, they aimed to establish a new colony not for God, or the greater good of humanity—but for the sake of profit. The Pilgrims who settled in Cape Cod in 1620 as agents of Plymouth Company found evidence of divine election in the fortunes they accumulated from a lucrative system of town-founding in the New World. The innovative and often ruthless entrepreneurs who followed these colonists carved out the immense North American frontier wilderness from the Atlantic Ocean to the golden sands of the California coast, and they forged industrial and technological revolutions ...
American Classicist
Flanders, who led the movement in the Senate to censure Joseph McCarthy and inspired Hamilton's depiction of Demosthenes in her final book, The Echo of Greece. Houseman also situates Edith Hamilton's writing in relation to contemporary events such as the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, American involvement in the Second World War, the dropping of the atomic bombs, and American foreign policy during the Cold War, among others. She argues that Hamilton's writing and themes were often a response to these events. Even Mythology, intended as a modern version of Bulfinch's Mythology, was partly written during the fascist Italian invasion of Greece and makes many arguments for the special claims of Greece in Western history. Her work has influenced generations of readers as well, and was even said to have been a favorite of Robert Kennedy's, who drew on The Greek Way for inspiration in drafting speeches. .
The Life and Undeath of Autonomy in American Literature
In The Life and Undeath of Autonomy in American Literature, Geoff Hamilton charts the evolution of the fundamental concept of autonomy in the American imaginary across the span of the nation’s literary history. Whereas America’s ideological roots are typically examined in relation to Enlightenment Europe, this book traces the American literary representation of autonomy back to its pastoral, political, and ultimately religious origins in ancient Greek thought. Tracking autonomy’s evolution in America from the Declaration of Independence to contemporary works, Hamilton considers affinities between American and Greek literary characters—Natty Bumppo and Odysseus, Emerson’s "poet" and...
Red Dreams, White Nightmares
From the end of Pontiac’s War in 1763 through the War of 1812, fear—even paranoia—drove Anglo-American Indian policies. In Red Dreams, White Nightmares, Robert M. Owens views conflicts between whites and Natives in this era—invariably treated as discrete, regional affairs—as the inextricably related struggles they were. As this book makes clear, the Indian wars north of the Ohio River make sense only within the context of Indians’ efforts to recruit their southern cousins to their cause. The massive threat such alliances posed, recognized by contemporary whites from all walks of life, prompted a terror that proved a major factor in the formulation of Indian and military policy in...
Killing over Land
In early America, interracial homicide—whites killing Native Americans, Native Americans killing whites—might result in a massive war on the frontier; or, if properly mediated, it might actually facilitate diplomatic relations, at least for a time. In Killing over Land, Robert M. Owens explores why and how such murders once played a key role in Indian affairs and how this role changed over time. Though sometimes clearly committed to stoke racial animus and incite war, interracial murder also gave both Native and white leaders an opportunity to improve relations, or at least profit from conflict resolution. In the seventeenth century, most Indigenous people held and used enough leverage t...
Peace and Friendship
For over 35 years, the dominant histories of the American West have been narratives of horrific conflicts. As dark and as bloody as western grounds have often been however, there were also important episodes of concord, instances of barriers breached, accords reached, and of people overcoming their differences as opposed to being overcome by them. Peace and Friendship highlights the instances of cohabitation, deepening our understanding of how the West came to be: through colonization, violence, misunderstanding, and, surprisingly, at times, peace.
Settle and Conquer
This rereading of the history of American westward expansion examines the destruction of Native American cultures as a successful campaign of "counterinsurgency." Paramilitary figures such as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett "opened the West" and frontiersmen infiltrated the enemy, learning Indian tactics and launching "search and destroy" missions. Conventional military force was a key component but the interchange between militia, regular soldiers, volunteers and frontiersmen underscores the complexity of the conflict and the implementing of a "peace policy." The campaign's outcome rested as much on the civilian population's economic imperatives as any military action. The success of this three-century war of attrition was unparalleled but ultimately saw the victors question the morality of their own actions.
American Stories
American Stories follows the evolution of our founding stories and myths and how they spread far and wide throughout our history. The story of the cherry tree, for example, tells us nothing about George Washington’s actual childhood, but surely it tells us something about what Americans wanted in the father of their country—an incorruptible leader of the people. Along the same lines, the story of Betsy Ross’s flag tells us nothing about how the Stars and Stripes came to be, but does tell us something about what Americans wanted in a founding mother—it is no coincidence that the Ross story, featuring a traditional woman’s role of sewing at home, was first told in 1870, one year after Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony challenged these roles by founding the National Woman Suffrage Association. There’s another reason these stories spread, and that provides another reason to follow their evolution. From Dodge City to Deadwood, and from Bunker Hill to San Juan Hill and beyond, these stories all have one thing in common: they are all a lot of fun to read.
Current Biography
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Harsh Country, Hard Times
Clayton Wheat Williams—West Texas oilman, rancher, civic leader, veteran of the Great War, and avocational historian—was a risk taker, who both reflected and molded the history of his region. His life spanned a dynamic period in Texas history when automobiles replaced horse-drawn wagons, electricity replaced steam power in the oilfields, and barren and virtually worthless ranch land became valuable for the oil and gas under its surface. The setting for Williams’s story, like that of his father before him, is Fort Stockton in the rugged Trans-Pecos region of Texas. As a youngster accompanying his father on surveying trips through the land, and subsequently as a cadet at Texas A&M, he de...
