Frank Carlson Library

Jules Archer begins with laws that opened up America-public lands and homesteading-and continues with banking, the Bill of Rights, subversion and sedition, foreign policy. Natural resources, labor, business, education and welfare, farming, Prohibition, the New Deal, the draft and G. I. Bills, slavery and civil rights. Archer chronicles the history of laws in America. Each chapter opens with a dramatic incident, and then develops the laws relating...

The founding fathers and mothers of the United States were not, as history often makes them out to be, stuffy cardboard figures of virtue and nobility. They Made a Revolution introduces them as the real people they were-complete with their inevitable flaws and weaknesses. Through their letters, diaries, and reminiscences, discover what was going on in the minds of this country's revolutionary leaders as they committed treason against the most powerful...

Is resistance un-American? How far should resistance go? Courage and desperation have sparked instances of resistance since the dawn of civilization. Jesus, Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King resisted the nonviolent way. Here for the record is a remarkably full discussion of instances of twentieth-century resistance to inform, inspire, and possibly instruct by example. Here are the frightening, inspiring stories of the anti-Nazi, anti-Communist,...

Slavery is wrong. Women can be doctors. Women can wear pants. These are truths that most Americans today would agree are unambiguous. But there was a time in this country when each of those statements resulted in vicious criticism. When she wore pants, Amelia Bloomer was a "hussy," subjected to jeers and catcalls. As the only female doctor in the entire western United States, Bethenia Owens was so unpopular that she was threatened with tar and feathers...

Why do people riot? From the Boston Massacre in 1770 to the Los Angeles riots of 1992, mob violence in the United States is often sparked by unjust court decisions, unfair taxes, unpopular wars, the fear of unemployment, and racial and ethnic prejudice. But there are also seemingly senseless riots over wild concerts and sports championships. What causes a peacefully assembled crowd to turn into a mindless, violent mob? What causes a police force or...

The majority of the civil rights movement in the United States occurred in three stages. The first stage began with the slaves in America fighting for their freedom. Frederick Douglass was a key player from the very beginning. Born a slave, Douglass escaped and went on to become one of the most respected abolitionist leaders. After the Civil War, freed slaves fought to overcome the still-prevailing prejudice and persecution. During this phase, Marcus...

A House Divided is an exciting introduction to two of the most fascinating players in the American Civil War. Ulysses S. Grant was gruff and sloppy, the son of a hardworking but uneducated man opposed to slavery. Robert E. Lee, a slave owner himself, was a polite, aristocratic Virginia gentleman who descended from the Revolutionary War hero "Light-Horse Harry." Both men studied at West Point but developed very different tactics-Lee proved to be a...

We often remember the 1960s as a time of peace and love, but it was also a time of assassinations, riots, and an unpopular war. Furthermore, more than three million people took to the streets in violent antiwar and civil rights demonstrations during this decade. In The Incredible '60s, renowned historian Jules Archer brings the glories and tragedies of the sixties to a new generation, with a comprehensive history of sixties counterculture, the Vietnam...

The story of the man who helped to undermine the American slave system.