Alan Axelrod

The compact history of a giant country.

American history is one of those subjects that students frequently labor over and can seem like a random collection of names, dates, and events. Understood as a collective biography and free of the cheerleading found in many text books, the fully updated fifth edition of The Complete Idiot's Guide® to American History explains the changing tides in America's most pivotal periods.

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Who are the pivotal figures in American history, the men and women who have helped shape us as a people and have influenced how we perceive ourselves as Americans? In this companion to his popular 1001 Events That Made America, Alan Axelrod looks into all areas of our collective past and highlights the famous as well as the infamous, the virtuous as well as the notorious, from the nation's earliest days to the present.

Serving up history...

“Miracle at Belleau Wood” begins in June 1918 at Les Mare Farm in France with just 200 U.S. marines, who spilled their blood to prevail against impossible odds, resisting an overwhelming German force of thousands and turned the battle back against the enemy, saved Paris, saved France, and saved the Allied hope of victory. Called "the Gettysburg of the Great War" by many at the time, it rescued America and its allies from almost certain defeat....

With April 12, 2011, set to mark the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War at Fort Sumter, the time is ripe for a new assessment of the conflict's most influential and controversial military leaders. Generals South, Generals North highlights twenty-four such commanders-twelve each from the Confederacy and the Union. Best-selling author and military historian Alan Axelrod presents a biography of each, narrates the major engagements in which...

A surprising and sweeping history that reveals the fur trade to be the driving force behind conquest, colonization, and revolution in early America Combining the epic saga of Hampton Sides's Blood and Thunder with the natural history of Mark Kurlansky's Cod, popular historian Alan Axelrod reveals the astonishingly vital role a small animal-the beaver-played in the creation of our nation. The author masterfully relays a story often neglected by conventional...

"Examines the history of Vietnam leading up to the war, investigates the reasons for the conflict, looks at the war's escalation and progression (or lack thereof), and explores its repercussions then and now"--Provided by publisher.

From the moment that Europeans landed on America's shores, they engaged in bloody conflict with the natives they encountered. Tensions and hostilities bred in the colonial wars with the Spanish, English, French, and Dutch would lead inevitably to the later wars of the removal period, skirmishes on the western Plains, and, ultimately, the confrontation at Wounded Knee. Now, captured here in the words of those who lived it, is the epic, violent history...