Description

Book 1: America’s westward expansion & so much more

A thrilling, tragic, and downright wild historic adventure of America’s westward expansion! Everything Your Schoolbooks Didn’t Tell You About America’s Westward Expansion

1805: Explorer William Clark reaches the Pacific Ocean and pens the badly spelled line “Ocian in view! O! the joy!” (Hey, he was an explorer, not a spelling bee champion!)
1836: Mexican general Santa Anna surrounds the Alamo, trapping 180 Texans inside and prompting Texan William Travis to declare, “I shall never surrender or retreat.”
1861: Two railroad companies, one starting in the West and one in the East, start a race to lay the most track and create a transcontinental railroad.

With a storyteller’s voice and attention to the details that make history real and interesting, Steve Sheinkin delivers the wild facts about America’s greatest adventure. From the Louisiana Purchase (remember: if you’re negotiating a treaty for your country, play it cool.) to the gold rush (there were only three ways to get to California–all of them bad) to the life of the cowboy, the Indian wars, and the everyday happenings that defined living on the frontier.

Book 2: King George and the American Revolution

What do the most famous traitor in history, hundreds of naked soldiers, and a salmon lunch have in common? They’re all part of the amazing story of the American Revolution.

Entire books have been written about the causes of the American Revolution.
This isn’t one of them.

What it is, instead, is utterly interesting, ancedotes (John Hancock fixates on salmon), from the inside out (at the Battle of Eutaw Springs, hundreds of soldiers plunged into battle “naked as they were born”) close-up narratives filled with little-known details, lots of quotes that capture the spirit and voices of the principals (“If need be, I will raise one thousand men, subsist them at my own expense, and march myself at their head for the relief of Boston” –George Washington), and action. It’s the story of the birth of our nation, complete with soldiers, spies, salmon sandwiches, and real facts you can’t help but want to tell to everyone you know.

Book 3: The Civil War and the two presidents

Get the feeling something big is about to happen? Welcome to the Civil War―one of the scariest, saddest, and occasionally wackiest stories in American History.

1856: Northern and Southern settlers attack each other in Kansas.
1858: Congressmen start sneaking guns and knives into the Senate chamber.
1860: President James Buchanan is heard wailing, “I am the last president of the United States!”

Unraveling a very complicated string of events–the small things, the personal ones, the big issues–Steve Sheinkin takes readers behind the scenes that led to The Civil War. It is a time and a war that threatened America’s very existence, revealed in the surprising true stories of the soldiers and statesmen who battled it out.