2024 the best books of history review

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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History

For many years, a single volume covering the "History of the West" did not exist. Paxson’s masterwork rectifies this problem – offering an essential, sweeping account of the American West and westward expansion from 1763-1893.

The American pioneer is followed to every frontier for nearly 150 years across fifty-nine chapters. Full of world-class insight, Paxson masterfully paints a picture of how the land mass of the United States was settled – starting with English settlers in New England to the wayward expansion across the continent and ending with the sunny shores of California.

Paxson’s literary genius does not shine in quotations from secondary and source material; he has made his material a part of himself. Indeed, rather than conforming to a social history, Paxson takes a historical, geographic, and pragmatic view of Westward expansion. He masterfully covers American history from the War for Independence to the Louisiana Purchase, conflicts with Native Americans and Civil War, Presidential edicts from Washington to Roosevelt, and even offers keen insight into the little-studied intricacies of frontier finance and the inside workings of canal and railroad corporations.

“Future historians will gratefully remember Mr. Paxson for essaying a task which others had either shirked or felt themselves incompetent to perform.”

This is a must-read for any student of American history.

About the Author: Frederic Logan Paxson was an American historian, President of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, and possessed undergraduate and PhD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a master's from Harvard University. As a historian, he was an authority on the American frontier and won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize for this work.

Chapters of this work Include:The American Frontier of 1763The Forks of the OhioThe Shenandoah Country and the TennesseeThe Rear of the RevolutionThe Land ProblemCreation of the Public DomainThe National Land SystemThe Old NorthwestThe Western BoundariesThe First New StatesPolitical Theories of the FrontierJeffersonian DemocracyThe Frontier of 1800Ohio: The Clash of PrinciplesThe Purchase of LouisianaProblems of the Southwest BorderThe Bonds of UnityThe Wabash Frontier: Tecumseh, 1811The Western War of 1812Stabilizing the FrontierThe Great MigrationStatehood on the Ohio: Indiana and IllinoisThe Cotton Kingdom: Mississippi and AlabamaMissouri: The New SectionalismPublic Land ReformFrontier FinanceThe American SystemJacksonian DemocracyThe East, and the Western MarketsThe Western Internal ImprovementsThe Permanent Indian Frontier, 1825-1841The Mississippi Valley BoomThe Border States: Michigan and ArkansasThe Independent State of Texas1837: The Prostrate WestThe Trail to Santa FeThe Settlement of OregonThe “State” of Deseret *The War with MexicoThe Conquest of CaliforniaFar West and PoliticsPreemptionThe Frontier of the FortiesThe Railroad AgeLand Grants and the Western RoadsKansas-Nebraska and the Indian Country“Pike’s Peak or Bust!”The Frontier of the Mineral EmpireThe Overland RouteThe Public Lands: Wide OpenThe Plains in the Civil WarThe Union Pacific RailroadThe Disruption of the TribesThe Panic of 1873Frontier PanaceasThe Cow CountryThe Closed FrontierThe Admission of the “Omnibus” StatesThe Disappearance of the Frontier

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0BNQB48K7
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Independently published (November 30, 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 374 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8366289245
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 16 years and up
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.37 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.85 x 9 inches
Reviewer: Mr. Vintage
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: A 1925 Pulitzer Winner + Amazing Account of American History
Review: Let me start out by saying that this is a beautifully laid out book, and looks great. This is a reprint of the original work published in 1925, and is far more beautiful than any vintage copy I’ve seen.I would recommend this book to just about anyone – it’s a true marvel of American history and a rare glimpse of the Wild West, written by someone who was actually alive much closer to the time period he is studying. Paxson’s work is unrivaled compared to other accounts of the West that I’ve seen. TL/DR: buy this book and give it a chance.Now, for a more detailed review:This won the Pulitzer in 1925. The version I read is the version that was re-published in 2022. While it looks like some other reviewers mentioned typos in the text, I didn’t find many. This is likely because the editors corrected these in subsequent printings. I also found some strangely outdated words used that could be mistaken for a typo (after all, this was written in 1925).That’s my biggest issue with the book: it’s a bit old, and a bit dense. Honestly, I love history and even I found it a little hard to read at times. If you love history, you’ll love this – but it’s a bit of a slow start, particularly as it focuses so heavily on detailed minutiae of the settling of the Ohio River (boring) before it gets to the more exciting stuff (The Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812, the Jackson administration, the Civil War, etc.).Still, once you get over the more dense parts, there are some very nuanced, insightful chapters on unique periods of American History. It’s remarkable to see that this work spans from the pre-Revolutionary days all the way from the Administration of George Washington to Grover Cleveland – a period of 130+ years.While I ultimately think that the view of American History has changed and evolved over the past 100 years – and rest assured, this work retains the original text which has some not “politically correct” phrasing in it – I continue to find this to be an enormously insightful and important book. A great supplement to other works including Presidential biographies, A People’s History of the United States, and others that cover the same era. Highly readable!

Reviewer: Arthur R. Silen
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: This is a history different than most you will find.
Review: History of the American Frontier 1763 -- 1893 is a cornucopia of facts and details about how the settlement of the American frontier occurred. That said, this is clearly the work of an amateur historian, even one who claims advanced degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Master's Degree from Harvard University. Professor Paxon asserts on the title page that he is a Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, and I have no doubt that this was true when his book was published in 1924. As a work of American historiography, I have no doubt that Prof. Paxson knows his subject well. The work differs from standard historical works that are marketed to historically-minded consumers by reason that he focuses an inordinate amount of time and effort on the subject of land tenure, and how it came to be that the public lands that devolved into the possession of the United States government were secured either by purchase, as in the case of Louisiana, purchased from France under Napoleon, but still having elements of its previous ownership by Spain. Similarly, Spain's residual claims to Florida were purchased by the United States in 1819.Prof. Paxson the publisher of The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, whose archives evidently provided the bulk of the material that he utilized to write his history of how the American frontier, a line of settlement characterized by a nominal population of six persons in each square mile of territory that the American government eventually claimed and occupied, came to be. He goes into substantial detail as to how these territories came to be settled, and from where the people settling those territories originated. Those who have taken basic courses in American history, and the eventual settlement of the American frontier during the 19th century, will recognize the movement of population initially into the territories of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio, wherein once a requisite number of settlers arrived, the territories became self-governing at least in local matters, whereupon they could petition Congress to allow them to proceed further towards eventual statehood. The Constitution required that all new states entering the union have a population of at least 60,000 people, and some of these territories required several years of new settlers in order to achieve the requisite total necessary for Congress to enact legislation establishing new states. Concomitantly, as landowner of what was then referred to as the Public Domain, the federal government oversaw land sales either to individuals, or to syndicated partnerships (as corporations were rarely used in those days) to agglomerated land sales sometimes running into the millions of acres.At the same time, as new settlers migrated to the new territories that eventually became the states of Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas Missouri Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, and Wisconsin, the land needed to be explored. The Louisiana purchase occurred in 1803, and in 1806, the Lewis and Clark expedition was sent northward and westward along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, eventually reaching the Pacific at the mouth of the Columbia River. During that time, the surveyors and explorers recorded what they saw, and who they met in the Indian tribes they encountered in the course of their travels. The exploration of the lands bordering the Mississippi River, and latterly the Missouri River, form the bulk of Prof. Paxson's attention.Many will be put off by Prof. Paxon's frequent use of the word "savages" to describe the aboriginal Indian tribes; he and the society in which he lived acted and believed that there was no place in American society for the Indian tribes, and the sooner they were pushed out of the way, the better. Likewise, the situation of former slaves in the South appears to be of no consequence to him. Paxson expresses no sympathy for their situation, whether as slaves, or post-Civil War, as a now-freed people struggling to accommodate themselves to a rapidly changing economy that was attracting immigration from mostly Europe, but also China, which was attracted to California in particular due to the mid century Gold Rush, but also because the Union Pacific Railroad Company was recruiting Chinese laborers to blast a right-of-way through the Sierra Nevada and lay track to connect with the Central Pacific Railroad Company building its line of track westward from Independence, Missouri. Given the polyglot nature of American society at the time, and the recency of mass immigration that had transformed the North American continent within the space of less than 75 years, it is natural for him and those of his society to draw sharp distinctions between native born American white people, and recent immigrants. By birth and education Paxson would have seen the great mass of those immigrants, chiefly white, but more recently favoring Southern and Eastern Europe as a people apart from the stock from which he arose.He also goes into considerable detail to identify the means by which agriculture, and with it commerce, developed along America's inland waterways.He also makes a very astute observations about the nature of agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce as it developed in the great watershed consisting of the Ohio River, the Mississippi, the Missouri, and its tributaries. He suggests that the southern plantation system, consisting of cash crops of cotton primarily, involving large plantations, and utilizing slave labor on a large scale, was economically inefficient, and kept large-living plantation owners at or near the level of bankruptcy, given the costs of maintaining their large households and workforces, with only the hope and expectation that they could export their cotton crop to factors in England would then sell the cotton to British mill owners to be woven into cloth. He does not mention that some portion of that slave-grown cotton production also found its way into the spinning Mills of the Merrimack River Valley between Massachusetts and New Hampshire; but the same economic applied to both situations. Even today, we see the same form of conspicuous consumption and ostentatious living among celebrities who in actuality maybe only one step away from bankruptcy.Prof. Paxson also writes about the banking system, without any real knowledge about how the system worked in the days before we had a National Banking Act that established the Federal Reserve system in 1914. He notes that Jacksonian Democrats profess to hate banks because typically the only contact they had with them was either to procure loans at sometimes ruinous interest rates, or face foreclosure when those loans could not be repaid. The American banking system of the mid-19th century was individualistic, entrepreneurial, and terribly vulnerable to economic catastrophe in which banks were forced to call in loans, or tried to squeeze what was owed them out of the collateral that the borrowers had signed away when they obtain those loans. It was a system of short-term credit that could not withstand any sort of downturn in business prospects. When European empires were at war with one another, such as during the Napoleonic era, American businesses did well producing foodstuffs and manufactured articles that the warring powers could not make for themselves. Availability of credit, and especially the lack of financial reserves that the system itself was unable to generate internally as savings, was the immediate cause of most bank failures. Prof. Paxson does not go into any great detail in this, as this was not his area of expertise; and it goes without saying that the financial fluctuations that were occurring from time to time had a great deal to do with the forward development and progress of the American economy as it applied to a generally agricultural society in which manufacturers were largely for local consumption.The one thing that Prof. Paxson emphasizes as the difference between Jacksonian Democrats and their southern supporters, principally the plantation class, was its antipathy to internal improvements funded by the federal government. In the north, the state of New York funded what was known as the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825. The canal, now known as the New York State Barge Canal, connected the Hudson River at Albany with the City continue continue of Buffalo on Lake Erie. This meant that barge traffic originating anywhere among the Great Lakes that could be connected through waterways running from the far end of Lake Superior, down to Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, across Lake Ontario, and thence to Lake Erie, could be shipped by waterway, typically utilizing large, flat bottomed barges capable of carrying several tons of produce each, down to the port of New York, where they could be then warehoused, and then shipped overseas, or to anywhere else that could be reached by water. This signal improvement went a long way towards making New York State, and by extension New York City, the economic powerhouses they became later in the century. The success of this venture was an incentive to other promoters of canals who also came to believe that they could also achieve a similar level of financial success. In Maryland, promoters were able to raise funds to create the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal that ran from Georgetown, in the District of Columbia, to Cumberland, Maryland, the same purpose to transport heavy goods by waterway, by using a canal which was the exclusive right away for the proprietor company. This canal, spanning a distance of 184.5 miles, was begun in 1828 and completed in 1850, and it operated sporadically until 1924. There were numerous other canals of varying lengths that were built and operated during the first half of the 19th century that serve the same purpose, to connect manufacturing areas that were served by the power of falling water down to the low lands, where their products were brought to market. Aside from the expense of obtaining right-of-way and the cost of building the canal itself, the principal reason why they did not succeed was the invention of the steam locomotive and the ability to build railroads, and to lay tracks to all but the most inaccessible places in the country. The South, with its antipathy towards public investment, lag far behind in having these facilities, when it's political grandees decided to go to war with the Lincoln administration over the issue of slavery. Prof. Paxson is not an economist, and he does not emphasize the point that should have been obvious to anyone who started the matter, that these interior improvements created spillover benefits that enriched entire regions. Instead they went to war to preserve slavery, and self-devouring economic system that would not be able to hold its own in an industrial society.Then there was the Indian problem. Prof. Paxson goes into considerable detail about the efforts of the federal government to move the indigenous native Indian tribes out of the reach of immigrants seeking to use native lands for agriculture. He makes it plain that the social and economic basis for those tribes existing was completely incompatible with the farmsteads that the American people and their government intended to establish on the entire American continent. The Indian tribes themselves, often at war with one another, had no ability to resist the concerted efforts of both federal government, its military component, United States Army, and local militia and irregulars in maintaining the often vague boundaries between Indian Country and the agricultural and industrial society that was seeking to displace them. Promises and guarantees were made as solemn commitments between the federal government and the various aboriginal tribes, only to be ignored at will by the onrushing migration of new settlers into the virgin Indian lands. The Unites States, both in its government and its people can justly be accuse of the same sort of bad faith decisionmaking and unprovoked cruelty toward its domestic aboriginal tribes that are the casus belli in present-day Palestine. White American policy was what we now see and declare to be 'ethnic cleansing', and a violation of international law in its modern manifistation. In historical studies, we are admonished to refrain from judging historical actions by modern, post-colonial standards and values. The stark fact remains that modern and aboriginal societies were fighting over the same land, but for widely differing objectives in putting that land to productive use. American Indian tribes have legal monopolies in operating most gambling resorts on reservation land.Tribes also maintain their own self-governing bodies that exist entirely under the aegis of the federal government, with no accountability to the state and local governments within they lie. There is obvious friction over jurisdictional boundaries and prerogatives. The land issues are largely quiescent, but are incapable of resolution so long as white citizens are encouraged to covet Indian lands on the bssis of their own self-asserted racial and cultural superiority..Prof. Paxson offers little discussion of the American Civil War except insofar as it was the occasion of the final breaking of the Indian's hold on the Great Plains of the North American continent. Under the administration of Abraham Lincoln, the federal government ceased attempting to sell lands in the Public Domain to settlers, either individually, or as agglomeraters. The Morrell Act of 1862 allowed individual farmers and their families to homestead land, with no cash investment, ownership to become fee simple if the occupant was still working the land at the end of five years. The Union Pacific Railroad was funded in 1863, using a combination of various land grants to the railroad promoters in alternating sections along the railroad right-of-way, that the railroads would sell to private owners in order to fund the railroad to completion. Following engineering surveys to establish the right-of-way, actual construction commenced in 1866 and was completed officially on May 10, 1869, when the president of the Central Pacific Railroad, Leland Stanford, ceremonially drove the so-called "gold spike" fastening the last rail section at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory. With this project accomplished, beyond establishing reliable and continuous railroad and telegraph communication between Sacramento, California, and the eastern two thirds of the United States was to signal the death knell of any sort of independent lands in which the aboriginal Indian tribes could carry on as before. For the next 30 years that were pockets of resistance to whoever the white man chose to travel, whether for agricultural purposes, or in search of mineral wealth hidden beneath the surface of the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada.Prof. Paxson takes the subject up in somewhat disordered fashion, and what gets the sense that the closer he came to completing his story, the less inclined he was to write a great deal about it. In no real sense was he a student of the history of the Intermountain area between Denver and the great valleys of California, the Sacramento, San Joaquin, and Central Valley, where the desert area between San Bernardino and San Diego. He makes a stab at discussing the exploration for mineral wealth, above and apart from the California Gold Rush of 1849 through 1855, or the settlement of Oregon and Washington State, Idaho. There are a few pages devoted to the promotion of the livestock cattle business from the southern plains the Texas Panhandle northward to Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas, with their early promise of endless pasturage to their eventual collapse in the mid-1880s due to overgrazing, the invention of barbed wire fencing in the mid-1870s, and the essential collapse of the cattle industry in the winter of 1885 and beyond where millions of heads of cattle froze to death and prolonged subzero temperature. Perhaps the good professor lost interest in his subject at this point, having little or no more to say about the area of his own specialty. During this period of time, a future president, the Theodore Roosevelt, operated a cattle ranch, which he eventually abandoned when whether and diminishing business prospects prompted him to quit. But Roosevelt wasn't in it for the money; for him it was a matter of personal growth away from the posh life and wealth that he had earlier in his life in New York State.As I said, Prof. Paxson's history serve a useful purpose, one which other, more consumer-oriented works frequently lack. I could not help but notice that here and there there typographical errors, mis-capitalizations, and a host of other little things that a professional proofreader or book editor would immediately circle and repair. In many respects, the book reads like a first draft. Although the cover says that the book earned itself a Pulitzer Prize (and I would be the last to say that it is not true) there is still something of the buckboard in this Western tale in the way it is organized and told. I will say that I learned a lot, and that the time I spent reading all of its 436 pages was well spent. That said, there is a decided lack of balance that is a skein that runs through the entire narrative. Well, chili peppers don't make a meal, but they do add a lot of flavor to whatever else is there. So, with those caveats in mind, I do recommend Prof. Paxson's book; but I urged readers to understand that there is a lot more to the story of the West than what they will find here. In my own studies, I typically follow what I call my Rule of Five. If I want to achieve a basic understanding of the subject that I have not already intimately familiar with, I will typically buy five separate works by other writers, read them all, and note their differences. When I do the math (1 × 2 × 3 × 4 × 5) that gives me 120 ways to look at the subject matter as a whole; between 50 and 60 percent of the material covered will follow a common theme that, with each reading, gets reinforced. The rest of it is new stuff, where each writer brings to the table whatever attracted him to the subject, which they may not have in common. It takes time, and it costs money, but the net effect is a well-rounded understanding of the subject. As of now I have four other volumes by different authors in which they will tell me their stories; and in the end I will know all of them.

Reviewer: Kindle Customer Walt
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: No easy road from 13 to 48 United States.
Review: Paxson put a lot of research into creating this history. Every state has struggled to get accepted into the United States from 14th to 48th.

Reviewer: Jeff Young
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Kinf of hard to follow
Review: Maybe the book would have gotten better, but it wasn't as interesting as I expected it to be. Ionly read the first chapter and decided to read a different book.

Reviewer: Al
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Interesting part of history
Review: Recommend this book to those who are interested in the growing of the U.S. into a nation. Found this book interesting.

Reviewer: Jim C
Rating: 1.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Unreadable - dated - more encyclopedia than book
Review: I like history books. I finish 90 percent or more of the books I start to read. The subject is fascinating.This book however, is unreadable. Every paragraph enters new names and new acts. The book becomes a jumble of facts. The book was written in the 1930s when I think facts were more important than good writing for content. If you are a college student writing a paper this may be a useful book but for other readers there are better uses for your time and money (this book is 500 pages or so with tiny, tiny type). None of the persons written in the book about come alive which a book like this needs for interest. (But how can they - each paragraph seems to introduce a new historical person and then they disappear, not to appear in the content again). Yikes!This book needs a modern updating.

Reviewer: D. Stevens
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: A Complete History of The United States of America
Review: Well done synopsis of the development of the Western and frontier territories of the Continental United States. The missing Star is due to the obvious need for more maps to accompany especially the early text. Big and smaller events are woven into a very coherent storyline that makes it easy to read and understand. Highly recommended.