"Rich, detailed, and pitch-perfect, with the witty and wonderful skipping off every page." —Maxwell Carter, Wall Street Journal Frederick Russell Burnham’s (1861–1947) amazing story resembles a newsreel fused with a Saturday matinee thriller. One of the few people who could turn his garrulous friend Theodore Roosevelt into a listener, Burnham was once world-famous as “the American scout.” His expertise in woodcraft, learned from frontiersmen and Indians, helped inspire another friend, Robert Baden-Powell, to found the Boy Scouts. His adventures encompassed Apache wars and range feuds, booms and busts in mining camps around the globe, explorations in remote regions of Africa, and death-defying military feats that brought him renown and high honors. His skills led to his unusual appointment, as an American, to be Chief of Scouts for the British during the Boer War, where his daring exploits earned him the Distinguished Service Order from King Edward VII. After a lifetime pursuing golden prospects from the deserts of Mexico and Africa to the tundra of the Klondike, Burnham found wealth, in his sixties, near his childhood home in southern California. Other men of his era had a few such adventures, but Burnham had them all. His friend H. Rider Haggard, author of many best-selling exotic tales, remarked, “In real life he is more interesting than any of my heroes of romance.” Among other well-known individuals who figure in Burnham’s story are Cecil Rhodes and William Howard Taft, as well as some of the wealthiest men of the day, including John Hays Hammond, E. H. Harriman, Henry Payne Whitney, and the Guggenheim brothers. Failure and tragedy streaked his life as well, but he was endlessly willing to set off into the unknown, where the future felt up for grabs and values worth dying for were at stake. Steve Kemper brings a quintessential American story to vivid life in this gripping biography.

How children and children’s literature helped build America’s empire America’s empire was not made by adults alone. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, young people became essential to its creation. Through children’s literature, authors instilled the idea of America’s power and the importance of its global prominence. As kids eagerly read dime novels, series fiction, pulp magazines, and comic books that dramatized the virtues of empire, they helped entrench a growing belief in America’s indispensability to the international order. Empires more generally require stories to justify their existence. Children’s literature seeded among young people a conviction that their country’s command of a continent (and later the world) was essential to global stability. This genre allowed ardent imperialists to obscure their aggressive agendas with a veneer of harmlessness or fun. The supposedly nonthreatening nature of the child and children’s literature thereby helped to disguise dominion’s unsavory nature. The modern era has been called both the “American Century” and the “Century of the Child.” Brian Rouleau illustrates how those conceptualizations came together by depicting children in their influential role as the junior partners of US imperial enterprise.

Most Americans familiar with General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing know him as the commander of American Expeditionary Forces in Europe during the latter days of World War I. But Pershing was in his late fifties by then. Pershing’s military career began in 1886, with his graduation from West Point and his first assignments in the American West as a horsebound cavalry officer during the final days of Apache resistance in the Southwest, where Arizona and New Mexico still represented a frontier of blue-clad soldiers, Native Americans, cowboys, rustlers, and miners. But the Southwest was just the beginning of Pershing’s West. He would see assignments over the years in the Dakotas, during the Ghost Dance uprising and the battle of Wounded Knee; a posting at Montana’s Fort Assiniboine; and, following his years in Asia, a return to the West with a posting at the Presidio in San Francisco and a prolonged assignment on the Mexican-American border in El Paso, which led to his command of the Punitive Expedition, tasked with riding deep into Northern Mexico to capture the pistolero Pancho Villa. During those thirty years from West Point to the Western Front, Pershing had a colorful and varied military career, including action during the Spanish-American War and lengthy service in the Philippines. Both were new versions of the American frontier abroad, even as the frontier days of the American West were closing. All of Pershing’s experiences in the American West prepared him for his ultimate assignment as the top American commander during the Great War. If the American frontier and, more broadly, the American West provided a cauldron in which Americans tested themselves during the nineteenth century, they did the same for John Pershing. His story was a historical Western.

This enlightening book focuses on the history of how the ethnic groups of Africa, eventually joined by white colonizers from Europe, created the seedbed for the hateful apartheid system in Southern Africa. The reader learns how apartheid began, the dehumanizing effects it had on the black population, and how it was finally abolished in its ‘zero hour’ in 1994. Written by historian, writer and researcher Geoffrey Hebdon, this is the second in a series that covers the experience of a British citizen who emigrated to South Africa during that era, and records in vivid detail his responses to the apartheid system and how South Africa and neighbouring countries evolved after apartheid was abolished. As well as the first European settlers and the white Afrikaners’ attempted enslavement of the black population, the book also covers the Zulu wars, the Anglo-Boer wars and individuals who supported apartheid such as Cecil Rhodes and the whites-only National Party of South Africa. Also covered are prominent leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) and the black revolutionaries who fought against apartheid, many of whom gave their lives or served life sentences for their “struggle”, including Nelson Mandela, who became South Africa’s first black president after serving years in prison.

Two volumes introduce the history of colonial wars in Africa and illustrate why African countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Somalia, and Sudan continue to experience ethnic, political, and religious violence in the early 21st century. This sweeping study examines the wars of colonial conquest fought in Africa during the 19th and early 20th centuries. From Britain's efforts to wrest control of the Sudan from military leader Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi, to Italy's decisive defeat at the Battle of Adowa in Ethiopia, to Leopold II's brutal reign over the Belgian Congo, the work surveys the devastation reaped upon the continent by colonization and illustrates how its combative influence continues to resonate in Africa today. Written by scholars in the fields of history and politics, this complete reference includes entries on wars, campaigns, rebellions, battles, leaders, and organizations. The work delves into key historical periods including the "Scramble for Africa" (ca.1880 to 1910); early European colonial wars in Africa, such as the Dutch in the Cape and the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique; and African rebellions against the early colonial state in the 1890s and early 1900s. Entries feature prominent events and personalities as well as lesser-known occurrences and players.

Frederick Russell Burnham (1861 – 1947) was an American scout and adventurer who serve with the British in southern colonial Africa. This classic includes the following chapters: I. The Making of a Scout II. First Lessons in Scouting III. The Tonto Basin Feud IV. My Smuggler Friend V. Ups and Downs in Globe VI. The Necktie Party VII. Gold Mining VIII. The Call to Africa IX. The Long Trail X. The Trek North XI. The War Cloud XII. Mashonaland XIII. The First Matabele War XIV. When the Compass Failed XV. Carrying Dispatches XVI. The Dash to Capture the King XVII. Wilson’s Last Stand XVIII. Forbes’s Retreat XIX. After the War XX. The Jameson Raid XXI. The Second Matabele War XXII. Rhodesia’s Darkest Hour XXIII. The M’limo XXIV. Klondike XXV. An Opinion of the Boers XXVI. Paardeberg and Modder River XXVII. The Pietersburg Failure XXVIII. Cattle Lifting Near Brakpan XXIX. Taken Prisoner at Sanna’s Post XXX. Escape From the Boers XXXI. Cutting the Railroad XXXII. Wounded XXXIII. Rewards XXXIV. The Great War and the Prospector