William Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee was one of the most famous works of American history written in the 1960s. The book is an intellectual history of the South before the Civil War, the perception of it in the North, and the effect it had upon the nation in the years from 1800 to 1860. First published in 1961 and out of print for several years, Taylor's classic study remains essential to the study of the pre-Civil War South.

William Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee was one of the most famous works of American history written in the 1960s. The book is an intellectual history of the South before the Civil War, the perception of it in the North, and the effect it had upon the nation in the years from 1800 to 1860. First published in 1961 and out of print for several years, Taylor's classic study remains essential to the study of the pre-Civil War South.

The book is an intellectual history of the South before the Civil War, the perception of it in the North, and the effect it had upon the nation in the years from 1800 to 1860.

Heir to one of the leading "Four Horsemen" mercenary companies, Jim Cartwright is having a bad year. Having failed his high school VOWS tests, he's just learned his mother bankrupted the family company before disappearing, robbing him of his Cavalier birthright. But the Horsemen of eras past were smart-they left a legacy of equipment Jim can use to complete the next contract and resurrect the company. It's up to Jim to find the people he needs to operate the machinery of war, train them, and lead them to victory. If he's good enough, the company can still be salvaged.But then again, he's never been good enough.

The son of a village blacksmith in Ohio, Custer qualified last in his class at West Point. Yet he proved to be a brilliant Civil War commander from the moment he made his debut at Gettyshurg. At age twenty-five he was promoted to the rank of major general, a feat that earned him the sobriquet "the boy general." Following the war, as part of the frontier army, he was handed the task of protecting the railroads by reining in the Plains Indians. Resplendent in buckskin he steadily built a reputation as an Indian fighter, enhancing his legend with his own writings. Always forthright with his opinions, Custer may have held a future career, some have suggested, in politics. However, this will never be known, for on June 25, 1876 Custer reached his untimely end. Heavily outnumbered by a combined force of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors at the Battle of Little Bighorn, Custer's entire company was cut down. Never before or since have Indians inflicted such a defeat on federal troops. This new illustrated book combines over 200 photographs and paintings, many in color, with a revised edition of Robert M. Utley's classic biography, Cavalier in Buckskin. Drawing on twelve years of additional research on Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Utley has dramatically changed his original interpretations of Custer's Last Stand, addressing the eternal question: might Custer have won?

Placing the South offers a selection of work published between 1985 and 2005 by one of the most incisive historians and literary critics of the South. The pieces seek to situate the South in a variety of contexts and offer a compelling defense of what Kwame Anthony Appiah has called "rooted cosmopolitanism." This is a mode of understanding based on respect for what is local and an awareness that regionalism is not enough. Hybridity, in both culture and literature, is inescapable and desirable. The first section of the book ("Placing") contains three comparative analyses that look at how regionalism has recently been conceptualized globally, how the modern South has acquired pertinence for those outside the United States, and how the relationship between Britain and the South has worked. The second section ("Ideologies") scrutinizes political ideas--freedom, imperialism, nationalism, racial ideology--which have transformed American discourse. The third section ("Forms") examines genre and how the South has been constructed and reconstructed by such literary forms as autobiography, biography, history, and literary history. The final section ("Writers") contains critical appreciations of political thinkers, novelists, poets, critics, historians, and sociologists important to southern intellectual life. Taken together, the essays offer a robust analysis of a dynamic region. Michael O'Brien is professor of American intellectual history at University of Cambridge and a fellow at Jesus College. He is the author of Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860 and other books.

American civilization has been shaped by four decisive forces: the frontier, migration, sectionalism, and federalism. The frontier has offered abundance to those who would/could take advantage of its opportunities, stimulated technological innovation, and been the source of continuous change in social structure and economic organization; migration has been responsible for relocating cultures from the Old world to the New; various sections of geographic territories have adjusted to the overall American culture without losing their individual distinctiveness; and federalism has shaped the United States' political and social organization. The Metropolitan Frontier and American Politics was begun in the late 1950s under the auspices of the University of Illinois Institute of Government and Public Affairs as a study of the eight "lesser" metropolitan areas in Illinois. What started out as a design for "community maps" of each area, with the intent to outline their particular political systems, led to a major study of metropolitan cities of the prairie--the "heartland" area between the Great Lakes and the Continental Divide--with an examination of the processes that have shaped American politics. The distinctive features of geographic areas that Elazar discovered can be understood as reflections of the differences in cultural backgrounds of their respective settlers. Understanding these communities requires an examination of their place in the federal system, the impact of frontier and section upon them, and a study of the cultures that inform them as civil communities. The volume is consequently divided into three parts: "Cities, Frontiers, and Sections," "Streams of Migration and Political Culture," and "Cities, States, and Nation," each of which explores Elazar's concerns in discovering the interrelationship between the cities of the frontier and American politics. A prequel to The Closing of the Metropolitan Frontier (published by Transaction in 2002), The Metropolitan Frontier and American Politics will be of great interest to students of politics, American history, and ethnography.