San Antonio College Library

Despite Fanny Trollope's dismissal of Americans as tobacco chewing, patriotic boors, travelers have a long history of commenting on American friendliness. Alexis De Tocqueville observed that their sociability made Americans more akin to the French than the "unfriendly disposition of the English." And Rudyard Kipling remarked, "it is perfectly impossible to go to war with these people, whatever they may do. They are much too nice." Although it often...

"London is famed both as the ancient center of a former empire and as a modern metropolis of bewildering complexity and diversity. In Indigenous London, historian Coll Thrush offers an imaginative vision of the city's past crafted from an almost entirely new perspective: that of Indigenous children, women, and men who traveled there, willingly or otherwise, from territories that became Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, beginning...

Presents evidence that our continent was visited and influenced by visitors from Europe and the Near East hundreds, even thousands of years before its "official" discovery in 1492. As such, this startling, fresh proof of their powerful impact on the pre-Columbian New World offers us a different view of American origins that threatens to re-write mainstream textbooks.

This narrative history of China's nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion (which cost some twenty million lives) brims with unforgettable characters and vivid re-creations of massive and sometimes gruesome battles, in a portrait of the largest civil war in history, a conflict that shaped the fate of modern China. The story begins in the early 1850s, the waning years of the Qing dynasty, when word spread of a major revolution brewing in the provinces,...