Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Clara Barton, Julia Ward Howe, and Sarah Josepha Hale came from backgrounds that ranged from abject enslavement to New York City’s elite. Surmounting social and political obstacles, they emerged before and during the worst crisis in American history, the Civil War. Their actions became strands in a tapestry of courage, truth, and patriotism that influenced the lives of millions—and illuminated a new way forward for the nation. In this collective biography, Robert C. Plumb traces these five remarkable women’s awakenings to analyze how their experiences shaped their responses to the challenges, disappointments, and joys they encountered on their missions. Here is Tubman, fearless conductor on the Underground Railroad, alongside Stowe, the author who awakened the nation to the evils of slavery. Barton led an effort to provide medical supplies for field hospitals, and Union soldiers sang Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” on the march. And, amid national catastrophe, Hale’s campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday moved North and South toward reconciliation.

Battles of the Red River War unearths a long-buried record of the collision of two cultures. In 1874, U.S. forces led by Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie carried out a surprise attack on several Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa bands that had taken refuge in the Palo Duro Canyon of the Texas panhandle and destroyed their winter stores and horses. After this devastating loss, many of these Indians returned to their reservations and effectively brought to a close what has come to be known as the Red River War, a campaign carried out by the U.S. Army during 1874 as a result of Indian attacks on white settlers in the region. After this operation, the Southern Plains Indians would never again pose a coherent threat to whites’ expansion and settlement across their ancestral homelands. Until now, the few historians who have undertaken to tell the story of the Red River War have had to rely on the official records of the battles and a handful of extant accounts, letters, and journals of the U.S. Army participants. Starting in 1998, J. Brett Cruse, under the auspices of the Texas Historical Commission, conducted archeological investigations at six battle sites. In the artifacts they unearthed, Cruse and his teams found clues that would both correct and complete the written records and aid understanding of the Indian perspectives on this clash of cultures. Including a chapter on historiography and archival research by Martha Doty Freeman and an analysis of cartridges and bullets by Douglas D. Scott, this rigorously researched and lavishly illustrated work will commend itself to archeologists, military historians and scientists, and students and scholars of the Westward Expansion.

Matej's Journey to America is a creative-nonfiction chronicle exploring the forces that drove our immigrant ancestors to new lands. After Adam and Eve's eviction from Eden, man slowly scattered with a great dispersion occurring about 2700 BC as the Lord confounded the tongues of presumptuous Babylonians building a tower to heaven. Among the afflicted was an Aryan slave named Chmelka who was growing hops (chmel in the new Slavic language) to flavor beer for his Semitic masters. As the Slavs fled northward toward unknown Czech lands, other tribes migrated in all directions. According to The Book of Mormon, the righteous Jared took a Semitic clan from Babel across the mountains, deserts and oceans to a New World . . . later named America. Another Semitic clan that passed through Babylon 850 years later included a young Abraham, destined to be the patriarch of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He introduced the concept of a single God revered by all his religious descendants, but despite their many commonalties, each of these three great religions seem convinced it has the only correct formula for salvation, justifying incredible atrocities with God always on its side. The descendants of the first Chmelka struggled as great civilizations developed and fell through the turmoil and bloodshed of the Dark Ages. Marco Polo awakened Europe in the late 13th century to the riches of the Far East, giving rise to explorers like Christopher Columbus who stumbled onto the North American Continent in 1492. The Protestant Reformation began to divide the Holy Roman Empire at the time, adding to the bloodshed as Austria, Prussia and France fought for domination in Europe. Meanwhile, Spain, England and France were colonizing and competing for control in the New World that was becoming home to an increasing number of European emigrants looking for a better life. The American Colonies fought for independence and then began to absorb all lands from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Thomas Jefferson purchased the immense Louisiana Territory from Napoleon in 1803, after which mountain men opened the West to homesteaders, miners and ranchers. My great-great-grandfather Matej was born as the Rocky Mountain fur trade boomed in 1825, and grew up on a 13-acre farm in Moravia where the Chmelkas had been serfs since Charlemagne was crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor a millennium earlier. Matej became a Dragoon in the Austrian Imperial Army and helped put down a revolution in Prague in 1848 the year gold was discovered in California but war spread and life worsened for European peasants. Gold, homesteads and wild Texas longhorns free for the taking lured thousands of oppressed Europeans to America on steamships and railroads now making long-distance travel feasible. After Prussia defeated the Austrian Empire including Bohemia and Moravia and then France, Matej's family escaped its misery and immigrated to Nebraska in 1871. They found a difficult life with grasshoppers, drought, hail and fires destroying crops . . . spurring Matej's fourteen-year-old son to join a Texas cattle drive and then dodge Indians and gunfighters for fourteen years in the Wild West. New technologies in farm equipment, transportation and communications made America the envy of the world in 1902 when Matej died and was buried near the prairie church he helped build. Matej's Journey to America honors him and his fellow immigrants ordinary men and women generally lost in history for the legacies and opportunities they gave us in our great land of freedom.

"It is 1921, and both Prohibition and bootlegging are in full swing. When Isaac Bell's boss and lifelong friend Joseph Van Dorn is shot and nearly killed leading the high-speed chase of a rum-running vessel, Bell swears to him that he will hunt down the lawbreakers, but he doesn't know what he is getting into. When a witness to Van Dorn's shooting is executed in a ruthlessly efficient manner invented by the Russian secret police, it becomes clear that these are no ordinary criminals. On a trail that leads from the ravages of post WWI Europe to the speakeasies of New York to the lawless streets of Detroit and Florida's lavish beachside resorts, Isaac tracks the footsteps of a criminal enterprise more ingenious and far-reaching than any he has ever known. He is up against a team of Bolshevik assassins and saboteurs, and they are intent on overthrowing the government of the United States. Packed with daring escapades and incredible heroics"--Provided by publisher

The U.S. 2nd Cavalry rolls into Texas in the 1870s with orders to keep the peace and persuade the fierce Comanches to move quietly onto the reservation.