History Of The Second Seminole War

History Of The Second Seminole War, 1835-1842

by John K. Mahon

By the third decade of the 19th century the growing American nation had expanded so far into the Florida peninsula that in 1832 a group of Seminole tribal chiefs accepted the terms of a treaty which provided for the removal of their tribes to the West. Wiley Thompson was appointed to supervise the migration. However, a great number of the Seminoles were deeply attached to their homeland and fiercely opposed exchanging their Florida land for that promised in the West. On December 28, 1835, warriors led by Osceola massacred Thompson and a number of American citizens, thereby beginning the Second Seminole War. It continued for almost seven years and would become the most expensive of all the American Indian wars, in both monetary and human terms. After the war John T. Sprague, who had participated in the war during its last years, published "The Origin, Progress, and Conclusion of the Florida War", for 120 years the only account of this episode in US history. Drawing on data, resources and insights unavailable to Sprague, Mahon sets out to bring a broad national perspective to this study, setting the war in the context of both Florida and US military history and Indian policy.

Hunted Like a Wolf

Hunted Like a Wolf: The Story of the Seminole War
by Milton Meltzer

A landmark work for teens chronicling the Second Seminole War (1835-1842) and the treachery of the U.S. during that time. A ragged, starving handful of guerrillas, the Seminoles and blacks resisted the invading U.S. Army ten times their number. Meltzer explores the Seminoles' choices and the sacrifices they made by resisting in the longest and costliest of the Indian Wars. The book reveals America's terrible racial history, the consequences of which we are only beginning to understand.

Short film about Dade Battle

Chicano!

Chicano!: The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement
by F. Arturo Rosales

Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement designates four major episodes of the Mexican civil rights struggle in the United States. Chapter One features efforts of the "lost-land" generation (southwest Mexican natives) to stem property losses, maintain their culture and assert civil rights given them by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo after the US takeover of the Southwest in the mid-nineteenth century. The second portion, Chapters Two to Five, views immigrant attempts in the early part of this century to protect themselves from a hostile American public. In the effort to safeguard their civil rights, an elaborate Mexico Lindo (Pretty Mexico) nationalism emerged that immigrants used to rally around issues of repression. Chapters Six and Seven look at the optimistic Mexican American generation made up primarily of children of immigrants who did not have ties to Mexico. Not only did this generation demand the civil rights to which they were entitled, but they also strove to acculturate to Anglo American culture without turning their backs on their Mexican heritage. In addition, Mexican Americans in this era made the greatest attempts to empower themselves as workers. The final and most lengthy section of the book traces the evolution of the Chicano Movement and assesses its legacy. It takes the reader through the most turbulent days of civil unrest and grass-roots organizing in Mexican American history.

The Uprising

The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington
by David Sirota

A work of investigative journalism, The Uprising is a firsthand narrative account inside America's new populist movement, from the streets of New York City to the halls of Microsoft to the Mexican border.

David Sirota, a 32-year-old progressive activist and journalist, spent a year on the road chronicling what he thinks are the stirrings of a mass revolt against the wealthy and the powerful. He may not have the Establishment quaking in its Guccis, but his always energetic, often ironic reporting certainly made the quest worthwhile…The Uprising is a hard book to dislike or dismiss. Sirota reports cleverly and in pleasing detail about a complex world of political conflict that the journalistic throng obsessed with presidential candidates and their handlers seldom notices.

Mexifornia

Mexifornia: A State of Becoming

by Victor Davis Hanson

This book is part history, part political analysis and part memoir. It is an intensely personal book about what has changed in California over the last quarter century.

Hanson's primary worry is steadily rising illegal immigration into a welfare state with expanding entitlements and waning commitment to the history and virtues of Western civilization, an admittedly imperfect, coercive consensus that nonetheless held together a uniquely successful, multiethnic nation. The emerging Mexifornia is becoming "not quite Mexico and not quite America either."

When Broken Glass Floats

When Broken Glass Floats: Growing up under the Khmer Rouge
by Chanrithy Him

Chanrithy Him vividly recounts her trek through the hell of the "killing fields." She gives us a child's-eye view of a Cambodia where rudimentary labor camps for both adults and children are the norm and modern technology no longer exists. Death becomes a companion in the camps, along with illness. Yet through the terror, the members of Chanrithy's family remain loyal to one another, and she and her siblings who survive will find redeemed lives in America.

A Long Way Gone

A Long Way Gone
by Ishmael Beah

My new friends have begun to suspect I haven't told them the full story of my life.

“Why did you leave Sierra Leone?”
“Because there is a war.”
“You mean, you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?”
“Yes, all the time.”
“Cool.”
I smile a little.
“You should tell us about it sometime.”
“Yes, sometime.”

This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them.

What is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone who came through this hell and survived.

In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he'd been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts.

This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.

Wetback Nation: The Case for Opening the Mexican-American Border

Wetback Nation: The Case for Opening the Mexican-American Border
by Peter Laufer

Journalist Laufer lays out the case for opening the U.S.-Mexican border to the free passage of Mexicans who wish to come North. He makes the case on human, political, and legal terms, frequently referencing the personal stories of those affected by current failed border policies in order to illustrate the problems caused by not doing so.