"Bat Masterson was a typical Western hero, but Robert DeArment shows that he was not a typical man of the Western frontier. The legend of bat Masterson results from his exploits as a buffalo hunter and Indian fighter, lawman and professional gambler, and his association with other notable Western figures. ...After convincingly describing Masterson the Western hero, DeArment continues the story of Masterson's later life as a fight promoter and a ...

Silas T. Grisamore was born in Indiana in 1825 and moved to Louisiana in 1846, settling first in Napoleonville and then in Thibodaux. He engaged in a variety of occupations but found most success as a merchant, selling goods from a flatboat that plied the waterways of the southern part of the state. When the Civil War began, Grisamore enlisted with the Lafourche Creoles, soon to become Company G of the 18th Louisiana Infantry Regiment. Because ...

In this monumental new biography, Robert V. Remini gives us a full life of Webster from his birth, early schooling, and rapid rise as a lawyer and politician in New Hampshire to his equally successful career in Massachusetts where he moved in 1816. Remini treats both the man and his time as they tangle in issues such as westward expansion, growth of democracy, market revolution, slavery and abolitionism, the National Bank, and tariff issues. ...

Ever the chronicler and teacher, Franklin wrote an autobiography, ostensibly for his illegitimate son William. Apart from hurried additions when he was in his eighties, his story halts at 1757. Tracing his footsteps centuries later, Franklin's most celebrated biographer completes the last twenty-five years of the autobiography by drawing on Franklin's most personal and insightful letters and writings--even making additions within the interrupted ...

James Kirker, "Indian fighter, " is among the most infamous characters of the American West. In his exhaustively researched biography, Ralph Adam Smith explores the controversy surrounding the life of this frontier figure.<P>Kirker emigrated from Ireland to New York City in 1810. In the years that followed, he was a privateer (in the War of 1812), a British captive, a merchant, a mountain man, the head of a private army, and a dominant ...

Rumor, gossip, and innuendo are the weapons of the home front, and no one wielded them with quite the aplomb of Maria Lydig Daly. Her richly detailed comments on everything from inept Union generals to Dorothea Dix's appearance provide the liveliest memoir to emerge from a Northern noncombatant. Daly was the wife of a prominent New York City judge whose connections allowed her to meet many major figures involved in Northern military and ...

In chronicling the life of governor and newspaper editor Charles Sprague, McKay guides readers through the politics and journalism of twentieth-century Oregon. Sprague's remarkable career, writes McKay, "is in effect the life of a state through Depression, war and recovery, and into the era of Tom McCall and the Oregon Story". ...

Chatham Roberdeau Wheat has rightly been called the grandest of Civil War heroes. Born a Virginia gentleman, this handsome giant was by turns lawyer, politician, filibusterer, wit, bon vivant, and soldier of fortune. Perhaps the most experienced soldier on either side at the outbreak of the Civil War, Wheat led the "Louisiana Tigers" -- notorious as the wildest battalion in either army -- in some of the war's bloodiest battles, including Bull ...

Documents Henry Lee's remarkable military career including his military exploits and the central role he played in both gathering intelligence and foraging for the Continental Army. During his four-year period, Lee fought almost exclusively north of the Mason-Dixon line, primarily in the states of Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. ...

Read the account of Kajsa Svensson Runeberg, an emigrant wife who recounts, through her diary, how she and her family built up a farm on the unsettled Kansas prairie. ...