Recommend a good US history book for a historian - Christmas gift

[Justanotherguy]

Any serious recommendations are greatly appreciated. He likes the western expansion period.

 

[Jann_Hörn]

The Unabomber Manifesto

 

[A Cardboard Box]

Blood and Thunder. It's a non fiction about manifest destiny written by a competent historian that manages to deliver seriously good information without boring the reader. Highly recommend.

 

[Bassomatic]

Funny enough I just got my god daughter, the Oreagon trail series of books.. based on the game, based on the... real event.

Klondike, is based off the Alaska Gold rush and something I personally find rather interesting (my grandfather while never gold hunted was deployed in Alaska and had a book on how to gold pan and it's really neat)

Pierre Berton, it's on amazon. If you're that lazy : https://www.amazon.com/Klondike-Las...ocphy=9007386&hvtargid=pla-570542991815&psc=1

 

[Screed]

 

[verissimus]

Actually I probably wouldn't mind the recommendation either on this subject.

 

[Jann_Hörn]

As a serious recommendation, Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age: A tale of today is a solid history book that gives a more primary perspective of post civil war America. You can’t go wrong with one of America’s best authors and not everyone has read it so it is a good gift imo

 

[Least Concern]

lol reading is for losers and even when i do read something it ain't gonna be no lame history book

but anyway "AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War" is a book about how inventors mastered the creation and distribution of electricity around the turn of the 20th century. In particular it focuses on the early competition between the alternating current system championed by Nikola Tesla and the direct current system championed by Thomas Edison, and how and why Tesla's system ended up winning and becoming the type of power we get from our power outlets even today - even though more and more of the devices we actually plug in are converting the power to direct current anyway, as that's what modern electronics need to operate.

"Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts" was first published in 2006 by Popular Mechanics and aims to deboonk a lot of the crazy shit that was flying around about 9/11 at the time - that a missile (rather than a plane) struck the Pentagon, that air defense sites were told to stand down, etc. Spoiler: Can (fires ignited by) jet fuel melt steel beams? No, but they didn't need to melt the beams; just weaken them to the point that they could no longer support the weight of the parts of the building above the crash site. Gravity and then the kinetic energy of a massive falling building did the rest. It has a forward by the Farms' favorite late senator John McCain (but don't let that stop you; like all forwards it can be safely skipped).

 

[dirtydeanna96]

The Way to the Western Sea: Lewis and Clark across the Continent." by David Lavender. Published by the University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

 

[Just A College Boy]

You can't go wrong with this gem. What Empire of the Summer Moon does for the Comanches, this book does for the Apaches. P.A. Hutton talks about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WobPsTdE3DA

A few highlights:
- Micky Free, whose name came from a British novel, is the person who intrigued him the most.
- He believes that General George Crook botched the Apache Wars.
- He would have loved to have written more on Victorio's sister, Lozen.
- Geronimo is a Custer-like character.
- He had to cut out entire chapters of this book.

 

[Wine em Dine em 69 em]

Don’t know what period you’re looking at, but I can’t recommend enough Robert Caro’s LBJ series as the most thorough look at Texan, DC, and American political history as a whole throughout the 20th century. The bibliography itself is invaluable.

 

[verissimus]

What about this book? Looks promising : https://www.amazon.com/Westward-Exp...26319815/ref=mt_other?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=