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Frank McLynn has penned a year-by-year account of the pioneering efforts to conquer and settle the American West. Wagons West is a stirring history of the years from 1840 to 1849 - between the era of the fur trappers and the beginning of the gold rush. In all the sagas of human migration, few can top the drama of the journey by Midwestern farmers to Oregon and California. Although they used mountain men as guides, they went almost literally into the...
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English
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A rare nineteenth-century journal of an everyday woman richly infused with the minutiae of antebellum daily life and work.
In 1820, Phebe Orvis began a journal that she faithfully kept for a decade. Richly detailed, her diary captures not only the everyday life of an ordinary woman in early nineteenth-century Vermont and New York, but also the unusual happenings of her family, neighborhood, and beyond. The journal entries trace Orvis's transition...
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English
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The open-range cattle era lasted barely a quarter century, but it left America irrevocably changed. These few decades following the Civil War brought America its greatest boom-and-bust cycle until the Depression, the invention of the assembly line, and the dawn of the conservation movement. It inspired legends, such as that icon of rugged individualism, the cowboy. Yet this extraordinary time and its import have remained unexamined for decades....
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"The sad, sordid story of the first American woman to face trial for capital murder." --
On Christmas night 1843, in a serene village on Staten Island, shocked neighbors discovered the burnt remains of twenty-four-year-old mother Emeline Houseman and her infant daughter, Ann Eliza. In a perverse nativity, someone bludgeoned a mother and child in their home--and then covered up the murders with arson. When an ambitious district attorney charges Polly...
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English
Description
Parading Patriotism covers a critical fifty-year period in the nineteenth-century when the American nation was starting to expand and cities across the Midwest were experiencing rapid urbanization and industrialization. Historian Adam Criblez offers a unique and fascinating study of five midwestern cities-Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, and Indianapolis-and how celebrations of the Fourth of July in each of them formed a microcosm for the...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8.6 - AR Pts: 18
Language
English
Description
Louisiana, 1843: a German immigrant thinks she recognizes a young slave girl as the long-lost daughter of her German friend, but the girl has no memory of such a past, and her owner refuses to free her. In novelistic detail, historian John Bailey reconstructs the exotic sights, sounds, and smells of mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans, an "infernal motley crew" of cotton kings, decadent river workers, immigrants, and slaves. The dramatic trial offers...
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Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 4.6 - AR Pts: 8
Lexile measure
740L
Language
English
Description
Relates the lives of Mary Todd Lincoln, raised in a wealthy Virginia family, and Lizzy Keckley, a dressmaker born a slave, as they grow up separately then become best friends when Mary's childhood dream of living in the White House comes true.
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Description
Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation. After his rescue, Northup published...
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"Americans have long regarded the freedom of travel a central tenet of citizenship. Yet, in the United States, freedom of movement has historically been a right reserved for whites. In this book, Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor shows that African Americans fought obstructions to their mobility over 100 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. These were "colored travelers," activists who relied on steamships, stagecoaches,...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: LG - BL: 2.9 - AR Pts: 1
Lexile measure
540L
Language
English
Description
"In this book, early fluent readers will learn about the causes, main events, key players, and lasting impacts of the Louisiana Purchase. Interesting photos and carefully leveled text will engage young readers as they learn about this important event in American history. An infographic enhances understanding of the Louisiana Purchase, and What Do You Think? sidebars encourage deeper inquiry. A timeline highlights key events and dates. Louisiana Purchase...
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"Thomas C. Buchanan paints a picture of 19th-century Mississippi, documenting the experiences among slaves and free blacks who lived and worked on the lower decks and along the river during slavery, through the Civil War, and into emancipation. He explores their efforts to link riverside African American communities in the North and South."--WorldCat.
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At large during the most colorful period in New Orleans' history, from just after the Louisiana Purchase through the War of 1812, privateers Jean and Pierre Laffite made life hell for Spanish merchants on the Gulf. Pirates to the US Navy officers who chased them, heroes to the private citizens who shopped for contraband at their well-publicized auctions, the brothers became important members of a filibustering syndicate that included lawyers, bankers,...
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"The story of the 1890s scandal in which a young woman named Madeline Pollard sued congressman William Campbell Preston Breckenridge for breach of promise. Pollard won the suit, and the mystery of who helped her pay the extravagant legal expenses in order to bring Breckinridge down illuminates a shift in the sexual politics of the Victorian era."--Provided by publisher.
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"Here's the fascinating origin story of baseball, where America's first sport came from and how it conquered a nation. Baseball's true founders were the thousands of amateurs -- ordinary people -- who played without gloves, facemasks or performance incentives in the middle decades of the 19th century. Unlike today's pro athletes, they lived full lives outside of sports. They practiced professions, built businesses and fought in the Civil War. Baseball...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 9.2 - AR Pts: 3
Lexile measure
1210L
Language
English
Description
Describes the period after the Civil War when the United States was becoming increasingly industrialized and technological, including the coming of the railroads, the rise of the large corporations, the development of labor unions, and government regulation.
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English
Description
Though the Emancipation Proclamation, limited as it was, ultimately defined his presidency, Lincoln was a man shaped by the values of the white America into which he was born. While he viewed slavery as a moral crime abhorrent to American principles, he disapproved of antislavery activists. Until the last year of his life, he advocated "voluntary deportation" concerned that free blacks in a white society would result in centuries of conflict. In...
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