USA

Before the extension of the railways, writes Louis C. Kleber, long cattle-drives were the way of life west of the Mississippi.

Sudie Duncan Sides explores plantation life in the Southern states before the American Civil War.

Because of his vision of New Amsterdam as the most important city on the Atlantic seaboard, writes Arnold Whitridge, Stuyvesant stands out in American history as the most memorable of the colonial governors.

For some sixty years during the eighteenth century, writes Sarah Searight, Louisiana was a colony owing allegiance to the King of France.

A hilltop view of a smouldering city, following the devastating earthquake of April 18th, 1906.

From Jefferson onwards, writes Arnold Whitridge, many nineteenth century United States leaders hoped that Cuba could be induced to “add itself to our confederation.”

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, writes Louis C. Kleber, the British came to America largely as settlers; the French as explorers and fortune-seekers.

In 1961, rattled by Soviet advances in space, President John F. Kennedy declared that, within a decade, the United States would land a man on the Moon. David Baker tells the story of how it took the US Air Force to change NASA and make the dream a reality.

M.J. Sydenham describes how, returning from the Colonies “with a most dreadful antipathy towards the government and nation”, this one-time highwayman conceived the scheme of striking a dramatic blow for America”.

In producing the complex of events that was to lead the Southern States from Union to Confederacy, Peggy Eaton – aggrieved wife of President Jackson's Secretary of War—played a small, but curiously dramatic, part.