Making of America

Tallahassee: A Capital City History chronicles the story of the city's growth from a frontier community into a modern Southern metropolis, renowned for its beauty, football, and political dramas. First, readers will journey with Panfilo de Narvaez, Hernando de Soto, and other waves of Spanish adventurers searching for the promise of gold and silver as they explored the lush wilderness that was Tallahassee. From there, readers discover a landscape ever changing as the centuries brought new settlers with pioneer visions of growth and wealth. Touching upon the major eras of this city's history, antebellum, Civil War, Reconstruction, the Depression, and Civil Rights, this comprehensive volume details the full identity of Tallahassee, celebrating its major figures and remembering the contributions of many of its everyday people, who truly shaped the course of Tallahassee's evolution.

Gadsden: City of Champions, with over 100 black-and-white illustrations, presents a comprehensive history of Gadsden's astonishing development and details the various stages of the city's evolution, from a neutral playing field between rival Cherokee and Creek tribes, to a wilderness stagecoach stop, to a humble village, to a major riverboat port, into a modern industrial city. Amid streetcars, opera houses, bustling mills, and unpaved streets, readers meet local figures, such as Colonel R.B. Kyle, Captain James M. Elliott Jr., Judge John H. Disque, Emma Sansom, and John W. Wisdom, and a host of colorful CHaracters-riverboat pilots, theater managers, mill workers, Pulltight saloonkeepers, and bootleggers-against an epic backdrop of war, Reconstruction, depression, fire, and prosperity.

The lives of the Native American, African, and European inhabitants of Bertie County have not only shaped, but been shaped, by its landscape.

One of the oldest counties in North Carolina, Bertie County lies in the western coastal plains of northeastern North Carolina, bordered to the east by Albemarle Sound and the tidewater region and to the west by the Roanoke River in the piedmont.

The county's waterways and forests sustained the old Native American villages that were replaced in the eighteenth century by English plantations, cleared for the whites by African slaves. Bertie County's inhabitants successfully developed and sustained a wide variety of crops including the ""three sisters""-corn, beans, and squash-as well as the giants: tobacco, cotton, and peanuts. The county was a leading exporter of naval stores and mineral wealth and later, a breadbasket of the Confederacy.

Bertie County: An Eastern Carolina History documents the long history of the region and tells how its people, at first limited by the landscape, radically altered it to support their needs. This is the story of the Native Americans, gone from the county for 200 years but for arrowheads and other artifacts. It is the story of the African slaves and their descendants and the chronicle of their struggles through slavery, the Jim Crow era, and the Civil Rights Movement. It is also the story of the Europeans and their rush to tame the wilderness in a new land. Their entwined history is clarified in dozens of new maps created especially for this book, along with vivid illustrations of forgotten faces and moments from the past.

Years before the first shots of the Civil War were fired, Florida witnessed a clash of wills and ways that prompted three wars unlike any others in America's history.

Among the most well-known of Florida's native peoples, the Seminole Indians frustrated troops of militia and volunteer soldiers for decades during the first half of the nineteenth century in the ongoing struggle to keep hold of their ancestral lands. While careers and reputations of American military and political leaders were made and destroyed in the mosquito-infested swamps of Florida's interior, the Seminoles and their allies, including the Miccosukee tribe and many escaped slaves, managed to wage war on their own terms. The study of guerrilla warfare tactics employed by the Seminoles may have aided modern American forces fighting in Viet Nam, Cambodia, and other regions.