History Nation State

There is a missing chapter in the narrative of Canada’s Indigenous peoples - the story of the Métis Nation, a new Indigenous people descended from both First Nations and Europeans. Their story begins in the last decade of the 18th century in the Canadian North-West. Within 20 years the Métis proclaimed themselves a nation and won their first battle. Within 40 years they were famous throughout North America for their military skills, their nomadic life and their buffalo hunts.

Based on a viral article, 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act is the essential guide to understanding the Canadian legal document and its repercussion on generations of Indigenous peoples, written by a leading cultural sensitivity trainer. The Indian Act, after 141 years, continues to shape, control, and constrain the lives and opportunities of Indigenous peoples, and is at the root of many lasting stereotypes.

The year: 1638. The setting: Providence, near Plymouth Colony. A young Nipmuc tribesman returning home from trading beaver pelts is fatally stabbed in a robbery in the woods near Plymouth Colony by a vicious white runaway indentured servant. The tribesman, fighting for his life, is able with his final breaths to reveal the details of the attack to Providence’s governor, Roger Williams. A frantic manhunt by the fledgling government ensues to capture the killer and his gang, now the most hunted men in the New World.

For over 100 years, thousands of Aboriginal children passed through the Canadian residential school system. Begun in the 1870s, it was intended, in the words of government officials, to bring these children into the “circle of civilization,” the results, however, were far different. More often, the schools provided an inferior education in an atmosphere of neglect, disease, and often abuse. Using previously unreleased government documents, historian John S. Milloy provides a full picture of the history and reality of the residential school system.

Our history is a heritage we Americans all share. It ties us together, like a common language or currency. Knowing that heritage helps us understand the central principles underlying American democracy and our responsibilities in passing them on to the next generation. At a time when so many seem to be losing sight of our identity as a nation, it's more important than ever to remember our heritage. Author and educator William J. Bennett and John T. E. Cribb offer 150 more great Americans whose far-reaching vision forged our nation, connecting you to this great nation's heritage.

In Becoming Hitler, award-winning historian Thomas Weber examines Adolf Hitler's time in Munich between 1918 and 1926, the years when Hitler shed his awkward, feckless persona and transformed himself into a savvy opportunistic political operator who saw himself as Germany's messiah. The story of Hitler's transformation is one of a fateful match between man and city. After opportunistically fluctuating between the ideas of the left and the right, Hitler emerged as an astonishingly flexible leader of Munich's right-wing movement.

In this bold and brilliantly argued book, acclaimed author and talk-radio host Michael Medved zeroes in on 10 of the biggest fallacies that millions of Americans believe about our country - in spite of incontrovertible facts to the contrary. In The 10 Big Lies About America, Medved pinpoints the most pernicious pieces of America-bashing disinformation that pollute current debates about the economy, race, religion in politics, the Iraq war, and other contentious issues.

Most histories of the Cherokee nation focus on its encounters with Europeans, its conflicts with the U.S. government, and its expulsion from its lands during the Trail of Tears. This work, however, traces the origins of the Cherokee people to the third century B.C.E. and follows their migrations through the Americas to their homeland in the lower Appalachian Mountains.

On a steamy Monday evening in 1900, New Orleans police officers confronted a black man named Robert Charles as he sat on a doorstep in a working-class neighborhood where racial tensions were running high. What happened next would trigger the largest manhunt in the city’s history, while white mobs took to the streets, attacking and murdering innocent black residents during three days of bloody rioting. Finally cornered, Charles exchanged gunfire with the police in a spectacular gun battle witnessed by thousands.

Abraham Lincoln, unlike most of his political brethren, kept organized Christianity at arm’s length. He never joined a church and only sometimes attended Sunday services with his wife. But as he came to appreciate the growing political and military importance of the Christian churches, and when death touched the Lincoln household in an awful, intimate way, the erstwhile skeptic effectively evolved into the nation’s first evangelical president. The war, he told Americans, was in some fashion divine retribution for the sin of slavery.

Dr. John Dee and his polymath protégé Sir Francis Bacon were the most influential men in the court of Queen Elizabeth I, part of an elite group with invisible control throughout Europe. And, as Steven Sora reveals, not only were they key members of the Rosicrucians, they were the driving force behind England’s colonization of the New World and the eventual establishment of the United States. From Avalon in Newfoundland to New England to Pennsylvania and Virginia, Sora shows how Bacon and Dee’s Rosicrucian impact is felt throughout North America.

Bob Woodward examines how the Bush administration avoided telling the truth about Iraq to the public, to the Congress, and often to themselves in State of Denial. Woodward's third book on President Bush is a sweeping narrative from the first days George W. Bush thought seriously about running for president, through the recruitment of his national security team, the war in Afghanistan, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the struggle for political survival in the second term.

In the winter of 1936, Franklin Roosevelt remarked in a fireside chat, "I do not look upon these United States as a finished product. We are still in the making." Certainly apt in the midst of the Great Depression, the idea of a nation in the making still resonates today as we measure the achievements and shortcomings of our democracy. Over the 20th century, Americans have worked, organized, marched, and fought to make the nation's ideals a reality for all.

Every evening for eight years, at his request, President Obama was given 10 handpicked letters written by ordinary American citizens - the unfiltered voice of a nation - from his Office of Presidential Correspondence. He was the first president to interact daily with constituent mail and to archive it in its entirety. In To Obama, Jeanne Marie Laskas interviews President Obama, the letter writers themselves, and the White House staff who sifted through the powerful, moving, and incredibly intimate narrative of America during the Obama years:

The companion volume to the 12-hour PBS series from the acclaimed filmmaker behind The Civil War, Baseball, and The War. America's national parks spring from an idea as radical as the Declaration of Independence: that the nation's most magnificent and sacred places should be preserved, not for royalty or the rich, but for everyone

During the first quarter-century after its founding, the United States was swept by a wave of land speculation so unprecedented in intensity and scale that contemporaries and historians alike have dubbed it a “mania.” In Speculation Nation, Michael A. Blaakman uncovers the revolutionary origins of this real-estate bonanza—a story of ambition, corruption, capitalism, and statecraft that stretched across millions of acres from Maine to the Mississippi and Georgia to the Great Lakes.

Historian Jay Sexton contends that our national narrative is not one of halting yet inevitable progress, but of repeated disruptions brought about by shifts in the international system. Sexton shows that the American Revolution was a consequence of the increasing integration of the British and American economies; that a necessary precondition for the Civil War was the absence, for the first time in decades, of foreign threats; and that we cannot understand the New Deal without examining the role of European immigrants and their offspring in transforming the Democratic Party.

In August 1862, after decades of broken treaties, increasing hardship, and relentless encroachment on their lands, a group of Dakota warriors convened a council at the tepee of their leader, Little Crow. Knowing the strength and resilience of the young American nation, Little Crow counseled caution, but anger won the day. Forced to either lead his warriors in a war he knew they could not win or leave them to their fates, he declared, "[Little Crow] is not a coward: he will die with you."

On a clear spring day in 1995, five members of a religious cult unleashed poison gas on the Tokyo subway system. In attempt to discover why, Haruki Murakmi talks to the people who lived through the catastrophe, and in so doing lays bare the Japanese psyche. As he discerns the fundamental issues that led to the attack, Murakami paints a clear vision of an event that could occur anytime, anywhere.

No more difficult task can be found in the twenty-six volumes of The American Nation than to write a fresh and original account of the Revolution...