Washoe County Library System

"While in the short term--militarily--the North won the Civil War, in the long term--ideologically--victory went to the South. The continual expansion of the Western frontier allowed a Southern oligarchic ideology to find a new home and take root. Even with the abolition of slavery and the equalizing power of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the ostensible equalizing of economic opportunity afforded by Western expansion, anti-democratic practices...

From the bestselling author of "Sea of Thunder" comes a riveting narrative about America's ferocious drive towards empire during the Gilded Age, and the uncanny resemblance of the Spanish-American War to the Iraq War of today.

"Elliott West lays out the main events and developments that together describe and explain the emergence of the American West and situates the birth of the West in the broader narrative of American history between 1848 and 1880"-- "In Continental Reckoning renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded...

A brief biography of the man who helped open the way west to California and was later elected as a United States Senator from that state.

"A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian's provocative reinterpretation of the eight decades surrounding the Civil War (and leading into the twentieth century); the next volume in the Penguin History of the United States, edited by Eric Foner. In this ambitious story of American imperial conquest and capitalist development, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Steven Hahn takes on the conventional histories of the nineteenth century and offers a perspective...