H. W. Brands

In Dreams of El Dorado, H. W. Brands tells the thrilling, panoramic story of the settling of the American West, from Lewis and Clark's expedition in the early 19th century to the closing of the frontier by the early 20th. He introduces us to explorers, mountain men, cowboys, missionaries and soldiers, taking us from John Jacob Astor's fur trading campaign...

From bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H.W. Brands, comes a revelatory history of the shocking emergence of vicious political division at the birth of the United States. To the framers of the Constitution, political parties were a fatal threat to republican virtues. They had suffered the consequences of partisan politics in Britain before the American Revolution and wanted nothing...

By the time he became president in 1801, Thomas Jefferson had already been looking westward for decades. He saw the country's population expanding and judged that America's territory must expand too, lest America become as crowded and conflict-prone as Europe. He started modestly, by seeking to purchase New Orleans from the French. Napoleon Bonaparte answered with a breathtaking proposal: would...