A thrilling re-creation of a crucial campaign in the Mexican-American War and a pivotal moment in America's history. In June 1846, General Stephen Watts Kearny rode out of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, with a thousand cavalrymen of the First United States Dragoons. When his fantastic expedition ended a year and two-thousand miles later, the nation had doubled in size and now stretched from Atlantic to Pacific, fulfilling what many saw as its unique destiny. Kearny's March has all the stuff of great narrative history: hardships on the trail, wild Indians, famous mountain men, international conflict and political intrigue, personal dramas, gold rushes and land-grabs. Winston Groom plumbs the wealth of primary documentation--journals and letters, as well as military records--and gives us a sleek, exciting account that captures our imaginations and enlivens our understanding of the sometimes dirty business of country-making.

The term "Manifest Destiny" has traditionally been linked to U.S. westward expansion in the nineteenth century, the desire to spread republican government, and racialist theories like Anglo-Saxonism. Yet few people realize the degree to which "Manifest Destiny" and American republicanism relied on a deeply anti-Catholic civil-religious discourse. John C. Pinheiro traces the rise to prominence of this discourse, beginning in the 1820s and culminating in the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. Pinheiro begins with social reformer and Protestant evangelist Lyman Beecher, who was largely responsible for synthesizing seemingly unrelated strands of religious, patriotic, expansionist, and political sentiment into one universally understood argument about the future of the United States. When the overwhelmingly Protestant United States went to war with Catholic Mexico, this "Beecherite Synthesis" provided Americans with the most important means of defining their own identity, understanding Mexicans, and interpreting the larger meaning of the war. Anti-Catholic rhetoric constituted an integral piece of nearly every major argument for or against the war and was so universally accepted that recruiters, politicians, diplomats, journalists, soldiers, evangelical activists, abolitionists, and pacifists used it. It was also, Pinheiro shows, the primary tool used by American soldiers to interpret Mexico's culture. All this activity in turn reshaped the anti-Catholic movement. Preachers could now use caricatures of Mexicans to illustrate Roman Catholic depravity and nativists could point to Mexico as a warning about what America would be like if dominated by Catholics. Missionaries of Republicanism provides a critical new perspective on ''Manifest Destiny,'' American republicanism, anti-Catholicism, and Mexican-American relations in the nineteenth century.

Why do thousands of Mormons devote their summer vacations to following the Mormon Trail? Why does the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Day Saints spend millions of dollars to build monuments and Visitor Centers that believers can visit to experience the history of their nineteenth-century predecessors who fled westward in search of their promised land? Why do so many Mormon teenagers dress up in Little-House-on-the-Prairie-style garb and push handcarts over the highest local hills they can find? And what exactly is a "traveling Zion"? In Pioneers in the Attic, Sara Patterson analyzes how and why Mormons are engaging their nineteenth-century past in the modern era, arguing that as the LDS community globalized in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, its relationship to space was transformed. Following their exodus to Utah, nineteenth-century Mormons believed that they must gather together in Salt Lake Zion - their new center place. They believed that Zion was a place you could point to on a map, a place you should dwell in to live a righteous life. Later Mormons had to reinterpret these central theological principles as their community spread around the globe, but to say that they simply spiritualized concepts that had once been understood literally is only one piece of the puzzle. Contemporary Mormons still want to touch and to feel these principles, so they mark and claim the landscapes of the American West with versions of their history carved in stone. They develop rituals that allow them not only to learn the history of the nineteenth-century journey west, but to engage it with all of their senses. Pioneers in the Attic reveals how modern-day Mormons have created a sense of community and felt religion through the memorialization of early Mormon pioneers of the American West, immortalizing a narrative of shared identity through an emphasis on place and collective memory.

Zeke battles bears, hunger, blizzards, and menacing people when his pioneer-wagon-train takes a treacherous wrong turn on the iconic Oregon Trail. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Chapter Books is an imprint of Spotlight, a division of ABDO.

Published in 1845, this guidebook for pioneers is a reproduction of one of the most collectible books about California and the Western movement. It was the guidebook used by the Donner Party on their fateful journey. In addition, because Hastings' shortcut route through the Rockies produced such tragedy, the War Department commissioned The Prairie Traveler.

The story of America’s westward migration is a powerful blend of fact and fable. Over the course of three decades, almost a million eager fortune-hunters, pioneers, and visionaries transformed the face of a continent—and displaced its previous inhabitants. The people who made the long and perilous journey over the Oregon and California trails drove this swift and astonishing change. In this magisterial volume, Will Bagley tells why and how this massive emigration began. While many previous authors have told parts of this story, Bagley has recast it in its entirety for modern readers. Drawing on research he conducted for the National Park Service’s Long Distance Trails Office, he has woven a wealth of primary sources—personal letters and journals, government documents, newspaper reports, and folk accounts—into a compelling narrative that reinterprets the first years of overland migration. Illustrated with photographs and historical maps, So Rugged and Mountainous is the first of a projected four-volume history, Overland West: The Story of the Oregon and California Trails. This sweeping series describes how the “Road across the Plains” transformed the American West and became an enduring part of its legacy. And by showing that overland emigration would not have been possible without the cooperation of Native peoples and tribes, it places American Indians at the center of trail history, not on its margins.

Follow the fascinating true stories of one family through the Mormon pioneer era—stories that follow four generations and several of the author’s family lines as they and their fellow pioneers help shape the early history of the Mormon Church, the American West, and even Mexico. This memorable journey is the culmination of fifteen years of painstaking research as the author carefully reconstructs the pioneer struggles from before 1830 to 1918 using information from family journals, memoirs, histories and letters. Volume II (Pioneering the West/Defending Zion, 1847-1880) continues the history by recounting the family’s involvement in the opening and colonization of the Great Basin. It recounts in detail the dangerous crossing of the plains in covered wagons, with handcarts, and on foot. It tells of explorations, of planting tiny settlements in remote regions, eating roots and rawhide to survive, and fighting insect hordes and hostile Indians. Volume II also tells how the Mormons faced off the U.S. Army, and how they helped build the railroad across the plains. My Own Pioneers is an important work illuminating the legacy of the Mormon pioneers. It is a compilation of true chronological accounts through which their lives, their sacrifices, and their considerable accomplishments, despite terrible hardship, may be honored. With its extensive index, this book provides an excellent research tool for academics as well as history enthusiasts; and it uplifts every reader by showcasing the enduring strength and mighty faith of these pioneers.

This compilation of genealogical and biographical sketches is extracted from the first five volumes of Bancroft's seven-volume History of California. Consists of a complete register of pioneers, alphabetically arranged, listing all known information of importance about them.