Custerology

Download or read book Custerology written by Michael A. Elliott and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-08-26 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a hot summer day in 1876, George Armstrong Custer led the Seventh Cavalry to the most famous defeat in U.S. military history. Outnumbered and exhausted, the Seventh Cavalry lost more than half of its 400 men, and every soldier under Custer’s direct command was killed. It’s easy to understand why this tremendous defeat shocked the American public at the time. But with Custerology, Michael A. Elliott tackles the far more complicated question of why the battle still haunts the American imagination today. Weaving vivid historical accounts of Custer at Little Bighorn with contemporary commemorations that range from battle reenactments to the unfinished Crazy Horse memorial, Elliott reveals a Custer and a West whose legacies are still vigorously contested. He takes readers to each of the important places of Custer’s life, from his Civil War home in Michigan to the site of his famous demise, and introduces us to Native American activists, Park Service rangers, and devoted history buffs along the way. Elliott shows how Custer and the Indian Wars continue to be both a powerful symbol of America’s bloody past and a crucial key to understanding the nation’s multicultural present. “[Elliott] is an approachable guide as he takes readers to battlefields where Custer fought American Indians . . . to the Michigan town of Monroe that Custer called home after he moved there at age 10 . . . to the Black Hills of South Dakota where Custer led an expedition that gave birth to a gold rush."—Steve Weinberg, Atlanta Journal-Constitution “By ‘Custerology,’ Elliott means the historical interpretation and commemoration of Custer and the Indian Wars in which he fought not only by those who honor Custer but by those who celebrate the Native American resistance that defeated him. The purpose of this book is to show how Custer and the Little Bighorn can be and have been commemorated for such contradictory purposes.”—Library Journal “Michael Elliott’s Custerology is vivid, trenchant, engrossing, and important. The American soldier George Armstrong Custer has been the subject of very nearly incessant debate for almost a century and a half, and the debate is multicultural, multinational, and multimedia. Mr. Elliott's book provides by far the best overview, and no one interested in the long-haired soldier whom the Indians called Son of the Morning Star can afford to miss it.”—Larry McMurtry

Download or read book Custer written by Larry McMurtry and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this lavishly illustrated volume, Larry McMurtry, the greatest chronicler of the American West, tackles for the first time one of the paramount figures of Western and American history--George Armstrong Custer. McMurtry also argues that Custer's last stand at the Little Bighorn should be seen as a monumental event in our nation's history. Like all great battles, its true meaning can be found in its impact on our politics and policy, and the epic defeat clearly signaled the end of the Indian Wars--and brought to a close the great narrative of western expansion.

Download or read book Custer's Last Stand written by Quentin Reynolds and published by Random House Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 1987 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of the boy who not only saw his dream to be a general come true, but also became the famous Indian fighter who led the attack against Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

Download or read book Shades of Hiawatha written by Alan Trachtenberg and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2005-10-19 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A book of elegance, depth, breadth, nuance and subtlety." --W. Richard West Jr. (Founding Director of the National Museum of the American Indian), The Washington Post A century ago, U.S. policy aimed to sever the tribal allegiances of Native Americans, limit their ancient liberties, and coercively prepare them for citizenship. At the same time, millions of new immigrants sought their freedom by means of that same citizenship. Alan Trachtenberg argues that the two developments were, inevitably, juxtaposed: Indians and immigrants together preoccupied the public imagination, and together changed the idea of what it meant to be American. In Shades of Hiawatha, Trachtenberg eloquently suggests that we must re-create America's tribal creation story in new ways if we are to reaffirm its beckoning promise of universal liberty.

Download or read book Jesse James written by T.J. Stiles and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-10-27 with total page 890 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this brilliant biography T. J. Stiles offers a new understanding of the legendary outlaw Jesse James. Although he has often been portrayed as a Robin Hood of the old west, in this ground-breaking work Stiles places James within the context of the bloody conflicts of the Civil War to reveal a much more complicated and significant figure. "Carries the reader scrupulously through James’s violent, violent life.... When [Stiles]… calls Jesse James the ‘last rebel of the Civil War; he correctly defines the theme that ruled Jesse’s life." —Larry McMurtry, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove via The New Republic Raised in a fiercely pro-slavery household in bitterly divided Missouri, at age sixteen James became a bushwhacker, one of the savage Confederate guerrillas that terrorized the border states. After the end of the war, James continued his campaign of robbery and murder into the brutal era of reconstruction, when his reckless daring, his partisan pronouncements, and his alliance with the sympathetic editor John Newman Edwards placed him squarely at the forefront of the former Confederates’ bid to recapture political power. With meticulous research and vivid accounts of the dramatic adventures of the famous gunman, T. J. Stiles shows how he resembles not the apolitical hero of legend, but rather a figure ready to use violence to command attention for a political cause—in many ways, a forerunner of the modern terrorist.

Download or read book The Day the World Ended at Little Bighorn written by Joseph Marshall and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of the legendary battle, told from a Lakota perspective, documents key Lakota oral traditions to reveal the nuanced complexities that led up to and followed the conflict.

Download or read book Inventing Custer written by Edward Caudill and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-09-03 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Custer’s Last Stand remains one of the most iconic events in American history and culture. Had Custer prevailed at the Little Bighhorn, the victory would have been noteworthy at the moment, worthy of a few newspaper headlines. In defeat, however tactically inconsequential in the larger conflict, Custer became legend. In Inventing Custer: The Making of an American Legend, Edward Caudill and Paul Ashdown bridge the gap between the Custer who lived and the one we’ve immortalized and mythologized into legend. While too many books about Custer treat the Civil War period only as a prelude to the Little Bighorn, Caudill and Ashdown present him as a product of the Civil War, Reconstruction Era, and the Plains Indian Wars. They explain how Custer became mythic, shaped by the press and changing sentiments toward American Indians, and show the many ways the myth has evolved and will continue to evolve as the United States continues to change.