Land America

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and on the eve of a national recession, New York Times writer Dan Barry launched a column about America: not the one populated only by cable-news pundits, but the America defined and redefined by those who clean the hotel rooms, tend the beet fields, endure disasters both natural and manmade. As the name of the president changed from Bush to Obama to Trump, Barry was crisscrossing the country, filing deeply moving stories from the tiniest dot on the American map to the city that calls itself the Capital of the World.

In this brilliant, gracefully written, and important new book, former Secretary of the Interior and Governor of Arizona Bruce Babbitt brings fresh thought to questions of how we can build a future we want to live in.

The culture wars are over and the idiots have won. This is a veteran journalist’s caustically funny, righteously angry lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States. The three Great Premises of Idiot America: · Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units; anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough; "fact" is that which enough people believe. And "truth" is determined by how fervently they believe it.

On the morning of November 4, 2019, a caravan of women and children was ambushed by masked gunmen on a desolate stretch of road in northern Mexico controlled by the Sinaloa drug cartel. Firing semi-automatic weapons, the attackers killed nine people and gravely injured five more. The victims were members of the LeBaron and La Mora communities-fundamentalist Mormons whose forebears broke from the LDS Church and settled in Mexico when their religion outlawed polygamy in the late nineteenth century.

In March 1621, when Plymouth’s survival was hanging in the balance, the Wampanoag sachem (or chief), Ousamequin (Massasoit), and Plymouth’s governor, John Carver, declared their people’s friendship for each other and a commitment to mutual defense. Later that autumn, the English gathered their first successful harvest and lifted the specter of starvation. Ousamequin and 90 of his men then visited Plymouth for the 'First Thanksgiving'. The treaty remained operative until King Philip’s War in 1675, when 50 years of uneasy peace between the two parties would come to an end.

In the later part of the 19th century, American bicyclists were explorers, cycling through both charted and uncharted territory. These wheelmen and wheelwomen became keen observers of suburban and rural landscapes, and left copious records of their journeys - in travel narratives, journalism, maps, photographs, illustrations. They were also instrumental in the construction of roads and paths ("wheelways") - building them, funding them, and lobbying legislators for them.

This monumental work of cultural history was nominated for a National Book Award. It chronicles America's transformation, beginning in 1880, into a nation of consumers, devoted to a cult of comfort, bodily well-being, and endless acquisition.

Growing up in Yakima, Washington, Noe Álvarez worked at an apple-packing plant alongside his mother. A university scholarship offered escape, but as a first-generation Latino college-goer, Álvarez struggled to fit in. At 19, he learned about a Native American/First Nations movement called the Peace and Dignity Journeys, epic marathons meant to renew cultural connections across North America. He dropped out of school and joined a group runners, all fleeing difficult beginnings. Telling their stories and his own, Álvarez writes about a four-month-long journey from Canada to Guatemala.

This thoughtful, in-depth account of Native struggles against environmental and cultural degradation features chapters on the Seminoles, the Anishinaabeg, the Innu, the Northern Cheyenne, and the Mohawks, among others. Filled with inspiring testimonies of struggles for survival, each page of this volume speaks forcefully for self-determination and community.

The Conquest of Texas is the story of the struggle between Anglos and Indians for land. Anderson tells how Scotch-Irish settlers clashed with farming tribes and then challenged the Comanches and Kiowas for their hunting grounds. Next, the decade-long conflict with Mexico merged with war against Indians. For fifty years Texas remained in a virtual state of war. Piercing the very heart of Lone Star mythology, Anderson tells how the Texas government encouraged the Texas Rangers to annihilate Indian villages, including women and children. This policy of terror succeeded.

In a world of border walls and obstacles to migration, a lottery where winners can gain permanent residency in the United States sounds too good to be true. Just as unlikely is the idea that the United States would make such visas available to foster diversity within a country where systemic racism endures. But in 1990, the United States Diversity Visa Lottery was created to do just that. Dreamland tells the surprising story of this unlikely government program and its role in American life as well as the global story of migration.

In the winter of 1913, high in the Canadian Arctic, two Catholic priests set out on a dangerous mission to do what no white men had ever attempted: Reach a group of utterly isolated Eskimos and convert them. Farther and farther north the priests trudged, through a frigid and bleak country known as the Barren Lands, until they reached the place where the Coppermine River dumps into the Arctic Ocean.

American Indians remain familiar as icons, yet poorly understood as historical agents. In this ambitious book that ranges across Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and eastern California (a region known as the Great Basin), Ned Blackhawk places Native peoples squarely at the center of a dynamic and complex story as he chronicles two centuries of Indian and imperial history that profoundly shaped the American West.

USA National Parks: Lands of Wonder is a celebration of these magnificent parks - packed with inspiring ideas for your next adventure, whether you want to be alone amid the vast and haunting wilderness of Alaska's Denali Park or get up close to the teeming tropical wildlife of Florida's Everglades. All 62 national parks are covered, showcasing what makes each one unique, with maps, facts and figures, things to do, and when and where to experience it at its best.

Before there was such a thing as "California," there were the People and the Land. We Are the Land is the first and most comprehensive text of its kind, centering the long history of California around the lives and legacies of the Indigenous people who shaped it. Beginning with the ethnogenesis of California Indians, this book recounts the centrality of the Native presence from before European colonization through statehood—paying particularly close attention to the persistence and activism of California Indians in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Widely believed to be the most extreme incidence of white racial violence against African Americans in modern United States history, the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre resulted in the destruction of more than 1,000 Black-owned businesses and homes as well as the murder of between 50 and 300 Black residents. Exhaustively researched and critically acclaimed, Death in a Promised Land is the definitive account of the Tulsa race riot and its aftermath, in which much of the history of the destruction and violence was covered up.

Vikings are an enduring subject of fascination. The combination of adventure, mythology, violence, and exploration continues to grip our attention. As a result, for more than a millennium the Vikings have traveled far and wide, not least across the turbulent seas of our minds and imaginations.

The Plot to Change America exposes the myths that help identity politics perpetuate itself. This book reveals what has really happened, explains why it is urgent to change course, and offers a strategy to do so. Though we should not fool ourselves into thinking that it will be easy to eliminate identity politics, we should not overthink it, either. Identity politics relies on the creation of groups and then on giving people incentives to adhere to them. If we eliminate group making and the enticements, we can get rid of identity politics.

In Sweet Land of Liberty: A History of America in 11 Pies, food writer Rossi Anastopoulo cracks open our relationship to pie with wit and good humor. She traces the pies woven into our history, following the evolution of our country across centuries of innovation and change and examining how America’s relationship with this iconic dessert impacted culture across eras—and vice versa.

America’s public lands include more than 600 million acres of forests, plains, mountains, wetlands, deserts, and shorelines. In this book, John Leshy, a leading expert in public lands policy, discusses the key political decisions that led to this, beginning at the very founding of the nation. He traces the emergence of a bipartisan political consensus in favor of the national government holding these vast land areas primarily for recreation, education, and conservation of biodiversity and cultural resources.