Land America

On the evening of August 21, 1831, Nat Turner and six men launched their infamous rebellion against slaveholders. The rebels swept through Southampton County, Virginia, recruiting slaves to their ranks and killing nearly five dozen whites - more than had ever been killed in any slave revolt in American history. Although a hastily assembled group of whites soon suppressed the violence, its repercussions had far-reaching consequences.

One woman's enlightening trek through the natural histories, cultural stories, and present perils of thirteen national monuments.

Deep in the heart of the Amazon, the city of Rondon do Pará, Brazil, lived for decades in the shadow of land barons, or fazendeiros, who maintained control of the region through unscrupulous land grabs and egregious human rights violations. They razed and burned the jungle, expelled small-scale farmers and Indigenous tribes from their lands, and treated their farmhands as slaves—all with impunity.

In 1929, in the blue-collar city of Portsmouth, Ohio, a company built a swimming pool the size of a football field; named Dreamland, it became the vital center of the community. Now, addiction has devastated Portsmouth, as it has hundreds of small rural towns and suburbs across America. How that happened is the riveting story of Dreamland. Quinones explains how the rise of the prescription drug OxyContin paralleled the massive influx of black tar heroin - cheap, potent and originating from one small county on Mexico’s west coast, independent of any drug cartel.

Scars on the Land is the first comprehensive history of American slavery to examine how the environment fundamentally formed enslaved people's lives and how slavery remade the Southern landscape. Over two centuries, from the establishment of slavery in the Chesapeake to the Civil War, one simple calculation had profound consequences: Rather than measuring productivity based on outputs per acre, Southern planters sought to maximize how much labor they could extract from their enslaved workforce.

Starting in our nation's earliest years, thousands of free African Americans were building hundreds of settlements in the Northwest Territory, a territory that banned slavery and gave equal voting rights to all men. This groundbreaking work of research reveals the lost history of the nation's first Great Migration. Though forgotten today, these pioneers were a matter of national importance at the time; their mere existence leading to fierce political movements and battles that tore families and communities apart long before the Civil War erupted.

The Texas Revolution has long been cast as an epic episode in the origins of the American West. As the story goes, larger-than-life figures like Sam Houston, David Crockett, and William Barret Travis fought to free Texas from repressive Mexican rule. In Unsettled Land, historian Sam Haynes reveals the reality beneath this powerful creation myth. He shows how the lives of ordinary people—White Americans, Mexicans, Native Americans, and those of African descent—were upended by extraordinary events over 25 years.

Seduced by the government’s offer of 320 acres per homesteader, Americans and Europeans rushed to Montana and the Dakotas to fulfill their own American dream in the first decade of the twentieth century. Raban’s stunning evocation of the harrowing, desperate reality behind the homesteader’s dream strips away the myth—while preserving the romance—that has shrouded our understanding of our own heartland.

These words, pounded out on a laptop at Cliven Bundy’s besieged Nevada ranch on April 6, 2014, ignited a new American revolution. Across the country, a certain type of citizen snapped to attention: This was the flashpoint the they’d been waiting for, a chance to help a fellow American stand up to a tyrannical and corrupt federal government. Up in Arms chronicles how an isolated clan of desert-dwelling Mormons became the guiding light - and then the outright leaders - of America’s Patriot movement.

From the boundary surveys of the 1850s to the ever-expanding fences and highway networks of the 21st century, Border Land, Border Water examines the history of the construction projects that have shaped the region where the United States and Mexico meet. Tracing the accretion of ports of entry, boundary markers, transportation networks, fences and barriers, surveillance infrastructure, and dams and other river engineering projects, C. J. Alvarez advances a broad chronological narrative that captures the full life cycle of border building

Throughout the stories here is information on how places, cities, and states got their names. However, questions arise because Native American tribes of the day didn’t yet have a written alphabet, and none of those came along until Sequoyah invented one in 1821, one that was actually more of a syllabary with symbols that stood for consonant/vowel sequences and could make words, basically just a writing system.

With the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Choctaw people began their journey over the Trail of Tears from their homelands in Mississippi to the new lands of the Choctaw Nation. Suffering a death rate of nearly 20 percent due to exposure, disease, mismanagement, and fraud, they limped into Indian Territory, or, as they knew it, the Land of the Dead (the route taken by the souls of Choctaw people after death on their way to the Choctaw afterlife). Their first few years in the new nation affirmed their name for the land.

It’s 1889, barely twenty-five years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and a young Black family is tired of working on land they don’t get to own. So when Will and his father hear about an upcoming land rush, they set out on a journey from Texas to Oklahoma, racing thousands of others to the place where land is free—if they can get to it fast enough. But the journey isn’t easy—the terrain is rough, the bandits are brutal, and every interaction carries a heavy undercurrent of danger.

The settlement of North America was the beginning of a new era in human history. The oppressive laws, habits, and customs of the Old World no longer held such power over those who had made the treacherous journey across the Atlantic. No reigning monarch or dictatorial power ever stepped onto the ground of North America. Yet, despite this, the men and women of the 13 colonies of North America were still not free until they threw off the shackles of England's government and asserted their own rights.

When Paul Revere is kidnapped by a time traveler determined to change the outcome of the American Revolution, 13-year-old Kep Westguard is sent to Boston, in 1775, to take his famous midnight ride. Kep’s four-person team has 24 hours to light the famous lanterns at Old North Church, warn Lexington and Concord that the British are coming, and rescue John Hancock and Samuel Adams from hanging as traitors to the crown.

Published in the years following 9/11, David Dark's book The Gospel According to America warned American Christianity about the false worship that conflates love of country with love of God. The assessment he brought to these problems and the creative resources for resisting them are now more important than ever. Dark expands his vision of a fractured yet redeemable American Christianity, bringing his signature mix of theological, cultural, and political analysis to white supremacy, evangelical surrender, and other problems of the Trump era.

Jacksonland is the thrilling narrative history of two men - President Andrew Jackson and Cherokee chief John Ross - who led their respective nations at a crossroads of American history. Five decades after the Revolutionary War, the United States approached a constitutional crisis. At its center stood two former military comrades locked in a struggle that tested the boundaries of our fledgling democracy. Jacksonland is their story.

America's Nuclear Wastelands presents an expert, yet straightforward overview of this complex topic, including nuclear weapons history and contamination issues. The author, a government consultant with a long career in Pacific Northwest nuclear waste issues, also explores the current institutional and political environment, demonstrating the critical role of public participation for past and future generations.

From drugstores in Sydney, Iowa, to skeet shooting in rural Illinois, to the mega churches of Minneapolis, Lenz set out to discover the changing forces of faith and tradition in God's country. Part journalism, part memoir, God Land is a journey into the heart of a deeply divided America. Lenz visits places of worship across the heartland and speaks to the everyday people who often struggle to keep their churches afloat and to cope in a land of instability.

Der Pulitzer-Preis-Finalist und National Book Critics Circle Award-Preisträger von Newjack führt durch ein wildes Amerika abseits des Zivilisation, wo es neben Unabhängigkeit und atemberaubenden Aussichten auch heftige Winde, Nachbarn mit krimineller Vergangenheit und minimale staatliche und medizinische Versorgung gibt.