Discover the stories of twelve women who "heard the call" to settle the west and who came from all points of the globe to begin their journey. As a slave, Clara watched as her husband and children were sold, only to be reunited with her youngest daughter, as a free woman, six decades later. As a young girl, Charlotte hid her gender to escape a life of poverty and became the greatest stagecoach driver that ever lived. As a Native American, Gertrude...

At turns heartbreaking, uplifting, fiercely romantic, and riotously funny, QUEEN OF AMERICA tells the unforgettable story of a young woman coming of age and finding her place in a new world. Beginning where Luis Alberto Urrea's bestselling The Hummingbird's Daughter left off, QUEEN OF AMERICA finds young Teresita Urrea, beloved healer and "Saint of Cabora," with her father in 1892 Arizona. But, besieged by pilgrims in desperate need of her healing...

The first in John Dos Passos's acclaimed USA trilogy—a "linguistically adventurous national portrait for a precarious age—his, and ours" (The New Yorker).
John Dos Passos's USA trilogy (comprising The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money), named one of the best books of the twentieth century by the Modern Library, is a grand, kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation, buzzing with history and life on every page.
Told...

In Volume One of The American Chronicles, Robert Vaughan panoramically evokes America at the beginning of the Twentieth century, poised on the brink of greatness and fraught with the tumult of rapid change. A time of robber-baron industrialists and rapid territorial expansion both at home and abroad, the new music called “ragtime” is the soundtrack for a confident nation of ambitious dreamers. It is 1904 and the nation’s eyes are on the St.Louis...

"In The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, acclaimed historian Manisha Sinha expands our view beyond the accepted temporal and spatial bounds of Reconstruction, which is customarily said to have begun in 1865 with the end of the war, and to have come to a close when the 'corrupt bargain' of 1877 put Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House in exchange for the fall of the last southern Reconstruction state governments. Sinha's startlingly...

"Delia Sweeney has always been unlike her older sister-- fair and delicate compared to tall, statuesque Nora, whose hair is as dark as Donegal turf. In other ways too, the sisters are leagues apart. Nora is her mother's darling, favored at every turn, and expected to marry into wealth. Delia, constantly slighted, finds a measure of happiness helping her da on the farm. The rest of the time, she reads about far-off places that seem sure to remain a...

Sophie Broadmoor adores fancy balls, beautiful gowns, and expensive jewelry. Indeed, she enjoys everything the Broadmoor wealth provides and has earned a reputation as the wildest of the Broadmoor cousins. During a trip to England, she falls head over heels for Wesley Hedrick, a wealthy widower who promises her the world. But Wesley's promises never seem to come true, and soon Sophie finds herself in a very compromising situation. Why does it have...

Travel into the world of American workers, and view the poignant social problems that accompanied industrialization. Learn how technological changes in industry affected living conditions for workers, and follow the rise of labor movements, violent strikes, and intense conflict between labor unions and management.

"Among the fabled tycoons of the Gilded Age--Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt--is a forgotten figure: Mrs. Frank Leslie. For twenty years she ran the country's largest publishing company, Frank Leslie Publishing, which chronicled postbellum America in dozens of weeklies and monthlies. A pioneer in an all-male industry, she made a fortune and became a national celebrity and tastemaker in the process. But Miriam Leslie was also a byword for scandal:...

"During Reconstruction Northerners attempted to remake the United States in their own image. They would make incarnate the new world Republicans imagined at the end of the Civil War. That new world seemed possible because the Republican Party controlled the Union in 1865 as fully as any political party would ever control the country. Reconstruction would produce a nation built around free labor with a homogeneous citizenry whose rights would be guaranteed...