"As a boy, Robert Kaplan listened to his truck-driver father tell evocative stories about traveling across America in his youth, travels in which he learned to understand the country literally from the ground up. In Earning the Rockies, Kaplan undertakeshis own cross-country journey to recapture an appreciation of American geography often lost in the jet age. Along the way, he witnesses both prosperity and decline--increasingly cosmopolitan cities...

Cullen Bohannon, a former soldier and slaveholder, follows the track of Union soldiers, who killed his wife. This brings him to the middle of one of the biggest projects in US history, the building of the railroad. After the war years in the 1860s, this connected the east with the still wild west.

"Presents a narrative history of the First Dragoon Regiment, from its inception in 1833 to the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848"-- "Having banished eastern Native peoples to lands west of the Mississippi, President Andrew Jackson's government by 1833 needed a new type of soldier to keep displaced Indians from returning home. And so the 1st Dragoons came into being. Will and John Gorenfeld tell their story--an epic of exploration, conquest,...

Describes the people and events of the age of Manifest Destiny and the American West, revealing historical details from the perspective of a traveler on the Oregon Trail, a laborer, and a Sioux warrior.