Book overview
"History in Davis's hands is loud, coarse, painful, funny, irreverent--and memorable."
-- San Francisco Chronicle
Following on his New York Times bestsellers America's Hidden History and Don't Know Much About History, Ken Davis explores the next chapter in the country's hidden history: the gritty first half of the 19th century, among the most tumultuous in the nation's short life.
These are the stories often left out of the textbooks--the moments that truly defined a rising nation.
- Fort Mims Massacre: The bloody frontier battle that shocked the nation, sparked a brutal war against the Creek Nation, and launched the military career of Andrew Jackson.
- A Daring Slave Rebellion: The forgotten story of Madison Washington, an escaped slave who led a successful revolt aboard the brig Creole, seizing freedom for more than 100 people and creating an international crisis.
- The Second Seminole War: A decades-long guerilla war in the swamps of Florida where runaway slaves and Seminole warriors joined forces to fight the U.S. Army to a bloody stalemate.
- Anti-Immigrant Riots: The shocking sectarian violence of the Philadelphia 'Bible Riots, ' a forgotten chapter of American intolerance where Nativist mobs burned churches in the City of Brotherly Love.
- Manifest Destiny's Power Couple: The intertwined journey of explorer John C. Fr