Central Kansas Library System

"The bloody Battle of Tippecanoe was only the beginning. It's 1811 and President James Madison has ordered the destruction of Shawnee warrior chief Tecumseh's alliance of tribes in the Great Lakes region. But while General William Henry Harrison would win this fight, the armed conflict between Native Americans and the newly formed United States would rage on for decades. Bestselling authors Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard venture through the fraught...

There were five times as many post offices in the United States in 1899 than there are McDonald's restaurants today. During an era of supposedly limited federal government, the United States operated the most expansive national postal system in the world. In this cutting-edge interpretation of the late nineteenth-century United States, Cameron Blevins argues that the US Post wove together two of the era's defining projects: western expansion and the...

When James K. Polk was elected president in 1844, the United States was locked in a bitter diplomatic struggle with Britain over the rich lands of the Oregon Territory, which included what is now Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Texas, not yet part of the Union, was threatened by a more powerful Mexico. And the territories north and west of Texas-what would become California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and part of Colorado-belonged to Mexico....

"This magnificent arch rises on the banks of the Mississippi River in St. Louis, Missouri. The nation's tallest monument is the centerpiece of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, honoring Thomas Jefferson's vision of westward expansion. Mired in controversy in the beginning, this amazing structure is now a national treasure and symbol of the nation's reach from the Atlantic to the Pacific."--

"Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally-recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous...

A Confederate soldier, out to exact revenge on the Union soldiers who murdered his wife, follows their trail to the raucous, traveling town alongside the construction of the transcontinental railroad.

Best known for his Civil War photographs, Alexander Gardner also documented the construction of the Union Pacific Railway, Eastern Division (later the Kansas Pacific Railroad), across Kansas beginning in 1867. This book presents recent photographs by John R. Charlton of the scenes Gardner recorded, paired with the Gardner originals and accompanied by James E. Sherow's discussion. Like most rephotography projects, this one provides fascinating information...

Traces the history of the United States' westward expansion from the post-Revolutionary period to 1853 when the present boundaries of the country were taking shape.

Discusses how the frontier in the United States moved west from the thirteen original colonies after 1763 and what life was like for the courageous people who chose to pursue the challenging existence of pioneers.