David Lavender: 10 books

The American West of the 1930s and 1940s was still a place of prospectors, cowboys, ranchers, and mountaineers, one that demanded backbreaking, lonely, and dangerous work. Still, midcentury pioneers such as David Lavender remembered “not the cold and the cruel fatigue, but rather the multitude of...

The story of the American fur trade has been told many times from different viewpoints, but David Lavender was the first to place it within the overall contest for empire between Britain and the United States. Rather than offering a simple hagiography of men like Jedediah Smith, Kit Carson, Jim Bridger...

Critics have called David Lavender a "master storyteller" (Library Journal), his prose "virile, disciplined, yet personal" (New York Times), and his book "a balanced, learned, and lively history of an epochal human exploit" (Choice).   Lavender sets the...

“In one very real sense,” David Lavender writes, “the story of the Oregon Trail begins with Columbus.” This opening suggests the panoramic sweep of his history of that famous trail. In chiseled, colorful prose, Lavender illustrates the “westward vision” that impelled the early explorers...

American history begins not with the English at Jamestown or the Pilgrims at Plymouth but with Spanish exploration of the border country from Florida to California in the 16th century. This handbook describes the expeditions of three intrepid explorers—De Soto, Coronado, and Cabrillo—their adventures,...

The story of America's westward movement is at heart the story of men and women of all origins and beliefs who helped shape the character of a nation. They lived a stirring epic, the telling of which grows ever more fascinating it becomes ever more remote. It has become a romance, a drama of men and...

Bent's Fort was a landmark of the American frontier, a huge private fort on the upper Arkansas River in present southeastern Colorado. Established by the adventurers Charles and William Bent, it stood until 1849 as the center of the Indian trade of the central plains. David Lavender's chronicle of...

From the earliest Spanish explorations in the late 1500s through the present, California's history and growth have been both tumultuous and phenomenal. All the historical facts are here: the missions and the Indians, the struggles between the Mexicans and the Americans, the fabulous gold rushes, statehood...

Another South is an anthology of poetry from contemporary southern writers who are working in forms that are radical, innovative, and visionary. Highly experimental and challenging in nature, the poetry in this volume, with its syntactical disjunctions, formal revolutions, and typographic playfulness,...

Race and racism have played a divisive and defining role throughout much of America's history. Slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and Ku Klux Klan terrorism have inflicted deep psychic wounds, social disparities, and economic disadvantages that have diminished the promise of equal rights and opportunities...