Contains a collection of letters written by the author to a former employer in Denver over the course of several years, in which she describes her frontier life homesteading in Burnt Fork, Wyoming.

"The story of the Astors is a quintessentially American story--of ambition, invention, destruction, and reinvention. From 1783, when German immigrant John Jacob Astor first arrived in the United States, until 2009, when Brooke Astor's son, Anthony Marshall, was convicted of defrauding his elderly mother, the Astor name occupied a unique place in American society. The family fortune, first made by a beaver trapping business that grew into an empire,...

Born at the end of the 18th century, the son of a Staten Island ferryman, Cornelius Vanderbilt world go on to become the richest man in America with a fortune built in shipping and railroads. That fortune, fought over by his heirs, helped to create an American dynasty that redefined the meaning of excess in the 19th and 20th centuries. Now , Cornelius Vanderbilt's great-great-great grandson Anderson Cooper, joins with historian Katherine Howe to explore...

Courage under Fire. Self-Sacrifice. Battles that Changed America. American history is full of men and women who have acted courageously when their families, communities and country needed them most. Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt discovered they both loved telling the stories of these outstanding individuals who helped make America. They pared down their favorite stories to 26 and gave them as a gift to the young people of America in 1895. The...

"From the National Book Award-winning and best-selling author Timothy Egan comes the epic story of one of the most fascinating and colorful Irishman in nineteenth-century America. The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against...

Perhaps the most powerful and influential black American of his time, Frederick Douglass, embodied the tumultuous social changes that transformed the United States during the nineteenth century. In a career of unprecedented breadth, Douglass rose from the oppression of his slave's birth to fame as an abolitionist.

The firsthand account of the life of adventurer, scholar, war hero, and twenty-sixth president of the United States Theodore Roosevelt. There must be the keenest sense of duty, and with it must go the joy of living. Here, in his own words, Theodore Roosevelt recounts his remarkable journey from a childhood plagued with illnesses to the US presidency and beyond. With candor and vivid detail, this personal account describes a life guided by a restless...

Born into slavery, Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley (ca. 1824-1907) rose to a position of respect as a talented dressmaker and designer to the political elite of Washington, D.C., and a confidante of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. In this unusual memoir, Keckley offers a rare, behind-the-scenes view of the formal and informal networks that African Americans established among themselves, as well as an insider's perspective of the men who made Civil War politics...

Recounts the life of the real "Rooster" Cogburn, a larger-than-life outlaw who exacted his own special brand of justice and epitomized the wild spirit of the Old West.

In 1898, at the start of the Spanish-American War, three regiments of volunteer American soldiers were formed to go to war. The most celebrated of them, the 1st United States Volunteer Calvary, also known as "The Rough Riders," was led by Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt. A motley crew of cowboys and Ivy League scholars, the Rough Riders were hastily trained and thrown into battle in less-than-ideal circumstances. This is Roosevelt's eyewitness...