Catalog Search Results
1) Shays' Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion: The History and Legacy of Early America's Domestic In
Author
Language
English
Description
Even as the young United States successfully secured its independence, the new nation was beset by problems. The drafters of the Articles of Confederation had deliberately avoided giving the national legislature the power to tax, because Parliament had so abused that authority against the colonies, but this proved to be a severe limitation on the national government. Besides hampering the Continental Army, the inability of the national government...
2) The Know Nothing Party: The History and Legacy of America's Most Notorious Nativist Political Party
Author
Language
English
Description
It is not uncommon that a failed movement or group from the past might be cited as a "cautionary" example for the world today. In the wake of contemporary debates over immigration, the "Know Nothings" have been regularly cited as an example of how dangerous nativist attitudes can become and, indeed, have proven to be in America's history. Several columnists, for instance, have striven to make comparisons between the Know Nothings of antebellum America...
Author
Language
English
Description
What would you get if you mixed Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred Hitchcock and Stephen King? The answer might be something resembling Howard Phillips Lovecraft, an extremely influential poet and author who mixed science fiction, horror and fantasy into a subgenre known as "weird fiction." Perhaps nothing encapsulates weird fiction like his creation of the monster Cthulhu, which has been used by other writers to spawn a fictional universe and mythology centered...
4) Italian Liberation Corps, The: The History and Legacy of the Italian Soldiers Who Fought with the
Author
Language
English
Description
Despite British diplomatic efforts, Italy had joined the Axis in 1940 with the intention of expanding its African empire and reliving the glories of Ancient Rome. That proved to be a major mistake, and by the spring of 1943 Italy had lost all its African possessions. The Axis' North African defeat opened up the possibility of taking the war in the west to the European continent for the first time since France's lightning conquest by the Wehrmacht...
5) John Wesley Powell: The Life and Legacy of One of 19th Century America's Most Influential Explorers
Author
Language
English
Description
One of the men most responsible for the closing of the frontier was John Wesley Powell, arguably the best-known American explorer after Lewis and Clark. He was lionized for a long portion of his life and vilified for another. Powell was a competent man, self-confident and able to instill confidence in his abilities to lead, and his expeditions helped Americans better understand the West, an impressive achievement for the son of English immigrants...
6) Cattle Kate: The Controversial Life and Legend of the Wyoming Territory's Most Famous Woman Outlaw
Author
Language
English
Description
In the span of scarcely more than a half century, the West developed from a handful of scattered fur trapping enterprises predominantly inhabited by males to a region full of burgeoning rustic communities, and before the government's official "closure" of the frontier as a lawless expanse, Western societies were essentially living apart from traditional American rule of law. What judicial structures were at work across the West were erratic, often...
Author
Language
English
Description
It was a frosty, wintry September morning in 2012 when 11-year-old Yevgeny "Zhenya" Salinder donned his warmest quilted jacket, a knitted woolen cap, and matching mittens and headed out the door with his faithful, tail-wagging dogs in tow. Like most mornings, the kid ambled about near the Sopkarga polar weather station, an isolated region in the northern Russian Taymyr Peninsula where he resided, but this particular morning, his pace was slowed by...
8) Whig Party, The: The History and Legacy of the Influential Political Party in 19th Century America
Author
Language
English
Description
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 staved off the slavery crisis for the time being, but by setting a line that excluded slave states above the parallel, it would also become incredibly contentious. It was against that backdrop and the election of Andrew Jackson that the Whigs emerged as opponents to the Jacksonian Democrats during a period of American history known as the Second Party System (1828-1854). Initially, the conflict was rooted not only in...
Author
Language
English
Description
The Byzantine Empire was the heir to two great cultures that cradled and nurtured European civilization: Greece and Rome. Constantinople, now called Istanbul, became a center of power, culture, trade, and technology poised on the edges of Europe and Asia, and its influence was felt not only throughout Europe but the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, and the Far East. Coins dating from the reign of Emperor Justinian I (r.527-565) have been found in...
Author
Language
English
Description
Before the Vietnam War, most Americans would have been hard pressed to locate Vietnam on a map. South Vietnamese President Diem's regime was extremely unpopular, and war broke out between Communist North Vietnam and South Vietnam around the end of the 1950s. Kennedy's administration tried to prop up the South Vietnamese with training and assistance, but the South Vietnamese military was feeble. A month before his death, Kennedy signed a presidential...
Author
Language
English
Description
Many of the first artists in the West were assigned to exploration and geological parties, working as archivists and obedient to demands of cold accuracy. However, a few were driven by an imaginative mix of real events and fantastical visions to whet the appetite of Eastern consumers and preserve their own nostalgia on canvas. Among the artists who developed a passionate relationship with the West to one degree or another, two remain iconic in the...
Author
Language
English
Description
The 19th century saw the rise of one of the largest, most powerful empires of the modern era. The sun never set on the British Empire, whose holdings spanned the globe, in one form or another. Its naval supremacy linked the Commonwealth of Canada with the colonies in South Africa and India, and through them trade flowed east and west. An integral but underutilized part of this vast trade network included China, a reclusive Asian kingdom closed off...
Author
Language
English
Description
In the 1850s, Americans widely believed that the area from the 97th Meridian to the Rocky Mountains was vast, sterile, and useless, fit only for wandering natives and something to be endured rather than enjoyed by the people traveling through. Putting the eastern border near the point where the Great Plains begin, a common name for the huge region was "The Great American Desert," and the acquisition of the Southwest from Mexico added to the already...
Author
Language
English
Description
When people think of ancient Greece, images of philosophers such as Plato or Socrates often come to mind, as do great warriors like Pericles and Alexander the Great, but hundreds of years before Athens became a city, a Greek culture flourished and spread its tentacles throughout the western Mediterranean region via trade and warfare. Scholars have termed this pre-Classical Greek culture the Mycenaean culture, which existed from about 2000-1200 BCE,...
Author
Language
English
Description
The fur industry was by extension the face of every world power pursuing a stake in the West, and the rivalries were ruthless. The Mexican border during this era lay far north of its present position, and the Canadian border was as yet nonexistent, pending the outcome of competing British, American, Russian and Spanish interests. Despite the American outpost established early at the mouth of the Columbia River in what would become Astoria, Britain...
Author
Language
English
Description
Otto von Bismarck, the leading German statesman of the 19th century, once joked, "There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children, and the US of America." He said this not because the Americans were a great concern for him - his main interest in the US was trade, but as the architect of the first unified German state, he was setting the tone for what two generations of German nationals would feel about America's apparent invulnerability....
Author
Language
English
Description
Smyrna was one of the various cities that enjoyed brief yet important periods of influence in which they spawned important dynasties, were the scenes of history-changing battles and were the sites of great advances in philosophy, science, and economics. However, despite the fact it endured in influence for more than 2,000 years, Smyrna never truly gained the reputation of better-known locales in the ancient world.
Located on the west coast of what...
Author
Language
English
Description
Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz died almost 200 years ago, yet he remains one of the most important and influential of all military thinkers. His teachings combined strategy with military knowledge to produce a dialectic approach to the philosophy of warfare, and his work is still widely taught in military academies around the world. There are few senior military leaders anywhere who are not familiar with his seminal book, On War. In fact, with...
Author
Language
English
Description
It was not until the excavations of the 1930s that many of the relics, reliefs, and clay tablets that offer so much information about Persian life could be studied for the first time. Through archaeological remains, ancient texts, and work by a new generation of historians, a picture can today be built of this remarkable civilization and their capital city. Although the city had been destroyed, the legacy of the Persians survived, even as they mostly...
20) Africa's Origin Stories: The History and Legacy of the Ancient African Stories that Sought to Exp
Author
Language
English
Description
By the dawn of the 17th century, Portuguese influence in Africa fell into decline, and the occasions of European contact with Ethiopia became very few and far between. It would be another three centuries before another European would venture into the holy precincts of Lalibela as part of a British military expedition mounted in 1867. Thus, the "rediscovery" of the remarkable churches and the story of Christianity in Ethiopia would only be recently...
Interlibrary Loan
Didn't find what you need? Items not owned by Main Library Alliance members might be available in other libraries across New Jersey. You can search JerseyCat and place a request for the item to be sent to your library.
If your library doesn't permit JerseyCat requests or the item can't be found, you can also contact your library for assistance.Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Try our Materials Request Service. Submit Request