Discover these tales of frontier justice and life and death struggles by transporting yourself to a bygone era of adventure and excitement. Originally published in 1907, Bat Masterson's gripping collection of short biographies introduces you some of the most famous lawmen and notorious outlaws of the Wild West, including cattle rustlers, sharpshooters, and gunslingers.

In this brilliant biography T. J. Stiles offers a new understanding of the legendary outlaw Jesse James. Although he has often been portrayed as a Robin Hood of the old west, in this ground-breaking work Stiles places James within the context of the bloody conflicts of the Civil War to reveal a much more complicated and significant figure.

Jesse James was born on September 5, 1847, in Kearney, Missouri. James and his brother Frank served in the Confederate Army before embarking upon their fabled criminal careers in the Old West. The James brothers made a name for themselves as daring bank and train robbers, leading the James-Younger gang. Gang member Robert Ford killed Jesse James in 1882, after which James became a true legend of the Old West. Here is his own untold story as related by his son.

In 1882, a notorious outlaw and a childhood friend of Billy the Kid was released from prison where he had been serving time for killing a Texas Ranger. His freedom finally secured, the outlaw disappeared and was never heard from again. Never, that is, until 1948, when he came out of hiding after almost 70 years. In the course of proving his identity to a court of law, the outlaw revealed that his friend Billy the Kid was not killed by Pat Garrett but was still alive even to that day.

In the 1850s, the young Frederick Law Olmsted was adrift, a restless farmer and dreamer in search of a mission. He found it as an undercover correspondent in the South for the up-and-coming New York Times. For the Connecticut Yankee, pen name "Yeoman", the South was alien, often hostile territory. Yet Olmsted traveled for 14 months, by horseback, steamboat, and stagecoach, seeking dialogue and common ground. Tony Horwitz rediscovers Yeoman Olmsted amidst the discord and polarization of our own time. Is America still one country?

The Texas Rangers came to life in 1823, when Texas was still part of Mexico. Nearly 200 years later, the Rangers are still going - one of the most famous of all law enforcement agencies. In Cult of Glory, Doug J. Swanson has written a sweeping account of the Rangers that chronicles their epic, daring escapades while showing how the white and propertied power structures of Texas used them as enforcers, protectors, and officially sanctioned killers.

Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in the 1970s. With the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative shot him dead at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell's murderer was acquitted—thanks to the same attorney who had previously defended the reverend. Casey Cep brings this story to life, from the shocking murders to the courtroom drama to the racial politics of the Deep South.

On the morning of June 1, 1921, a white mob numbering in the thousands marched across the railroad tracks dividing black from white in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and obliterated a black community then celebrated as one of America's most prosperous. The Burning will recreate the town of Greenwood at the height of its prosperity, explore the currents of hatred, racism, and mistrust between its black residents and neighboring Tulsa's white population, narrate events leading up to and including Greenwood's annihilation, and document the subsequent silence that surrounded the tragedy.

Billy the Kid - a.k.a. Henry McCarty, Henry Antrim, and William Bonney - was a horse thief, cattle rustler, charismatic rogue, and cold-blooded killer. A superb shot, the Kid gunned down four men single-handedly and five others with the help of cronies. Two of his victims were Lincoln County, New Mexico, deputies, killed during the Kid's brazen daylight escape from the courthouse jail on April 28, 1881.

A murderous atmosphere pervaded 19th-century America marked by lurid newspaper accounts and remembered in ballad and verse. The Bloody Century presents 50 of the most intriguing murder cases from the archives of American crime. It is a collection of fascinating stories - some famous, some long-buried - of Americans, driven by desperation, greed, jealousy, or an irrational bloodlust, to take another’s life.

On the last day of eighth grade, Maggie begins to dream of finding a way to escape the drudgery and confinement of life in the hollow and establish her independence. Her plan begins to fall in place when she enters high school and discovers she has a natural talent for excelling in shorthand, typing, and other business classes. Meanwhile she spares no effort in helping her family continue to survive despite their poverty, a less than fertile few acres, and a family history of instability.

4 Counties: The Story of the Last King of Texas is the first novel in a series based on the runaway lifestyle of rodeo cowboy, rancher, and oilman Kenny Wayne Harris. Follow the fast track of Kenny's early life as a star high school athlete, his rodeo career, then his thrilling adventures as head of the iconic Harris Ranches, among the most famous pieces of property in the state: one of the original Republic of Texas, 300,000-acre land grants gifted by Sam Houston to each of his original Texas Rangers.

It was the most famous bank robbery of all time, involving the legendary James-Younger gang's final shocking holdup - the infamous Northfield Raid - and the thrilling two-week chase that followed. Mark Lee Gardner, author of the critically acclaimed To Hell on a Fast Horse, takes us inside Northfield's First National Bank and outside to the streets as Jesse James and his band of outlaws square off against the heroic citizens who risked their lives to defeat America's most daring criminals.

In Brother Robert, nonagenarian Annye C. Anderson sheds new light on a real-life figure largely obscured by his own legend: her kind and incredibly talented stepbrother, Robert Johnson. This book chronicles Johnson's unconventional path to stardom, from the harrowing story behind his illegitimate birth, to his first strum of the guitar on Anderson's father's knee, to the genre-defining recordings that would one day secure his legacy.

Alafair Tucker is a strong woman and the core of her family’s life on a farm in Oklahoma where backbreaking work and the daily logistics of caring for her husband and their nine children, and of being a good neighbor, requires determination and a clear head. She’s also a woman of strong opinions, and it is her opinion that her neighbor, Harley Day, is a drunkard and a reprobate. So, when Harley’s body is discovered frozen in a snowdrift one January day in 1912, she isn’t surprised that his long-suffering family isn’t particularly broken up. When Alafair helps Harley’s wife prepare the body for burial, she discovers that Harley’s demise was anything but natural.

Was Billy the Kid really shot to death by Sheriff Pat Garrett on a July night in 1881? At the midpoint of the last century, an old man comes forth seeking a pardon for crimes committed. He says that he wants to die a free man - and that he is Billy the Kid. The incident leads to this examination of new facts, new interpretations, and new contradictions. It is the story of "Brushy" Bill Roberts, a man who laid claim to a legend. Originally published in 1955 by University of New Mexico Press.

Teddy Roosevelt once exclaimed, "When I am in California, I am not in the West. I am west of the West", and in this book, Mark Arax spends four years travelling up and down the Golden State to explore its singular place in the world. This is California beyond the clichés. This is California as only a native son, deep in the dust, could draw it.

Billy the Kid - a.k.a. Henry McCarty, Henry Antrim, and William Bonney - was a horse thief, cattle rustler, charismatic rogue, and cold-blooded killer. A superb shot, the Kid gunned down four men single-handedly and five others with the help of cronies. Two of his victims were Lincoln County, New Mexico, deputies, killed during the Kid's brazen daylight escape from the courthouse jail on April 28, 1881.

For more than a century the life and death of Butch Cassidy have been the subject of legend, spawning a small industry of mythmakers and a major Hollywood film. But who was Butch Cassidy, really? Charles Leerhsen, best-selling author of Ty Cobb, sorts out the facts from folklore and paints a “compelling portrait of the charming, debonair, ranch hand-turned-outlaw” (Ron Hansen, author of The Kid) of the American West.

The Open Range cattle era lasted barely a quarter-century, but it left America irrevocably changed. These few decades following the Civil War brought America its greatest boom-and-bust cycle until the Depression, the invention of the assembly line, and the dawn of the conservation movement. It inspired legends, such as that icon of rugged individualism, the cowboy. Yet this extraordinary time and its import have remained unexamined for decades. Cattle Kingdom reveals the truth of how the West rose and fell, and how its legacy defines us today.

This book talks about the experiences of hunter and conservationist Jim Corbett, during his years in the United Provinces, or what is now known as Uttarakhand. Here we see a different side to Corbett, not as the intrepid hunter of big cats but a man who blends seamlessly with the mountain folk of Northern India. Join him in his adventures and feel the thrills of hunting; follow him into dense forests as he encounters a dreaded dacoit who has a heart of gold; and enjoy the tales of love, loyalty, and resilience of simple villagers.

In an American story of enduring importance, former President Jimmy Carter re-creates his Depression-era boyhood on a Georgia farm, before the civil rights movement that changed the country.

Over the course of less than 24 hours in the spring of 1921, Tulsa’s infamous “Black Wall Street” was wiped off the map - and erased from the history books. Official records were disappeared, researchers were threatened, and the worst single incident of racial violence in American history was kept hidden for more than 50 years. But there were some secrets that would not die. A riveting and essential new book, The Ground Breaking not only tells the long-suppressed story of the notorious Tulsa race massacre.

Filled with bitter quarrels, reckless affairs, treacherous betrayals, relentless mercenaries, and courageous detectives, The Feud is the riveting story of two frontier families struggling for survival within the narrow confines of an unforgiving land. It is a formative American tale, and in it, we see the reflection of our own family bonds and the lengths to which we might go in order to defend our honor, our loyalties, and our livelihood.

The Texas Rangers came to life in 1823, when Texas was still part of Mexico. Nearly 200 years later, the Rangers are still going - one of the most famous of all law enforcement agencies. In Cult of Glory, Doug J. Swanson has written a sweeping account of the Rangers that chronicles their epic, daring escapades while showing how the white and propertied power structures of Texas used them as enforcers, protectors, and officially sanctioned killers.

From her home on the California coast, Dalva hears the broad silence of the Nebraska prairie where she was born, and longs for the son she gave up for adoption years before. Beautiful, fearless, tormented, at 45 she has lived a life of lovers and adventures. Now, Dalva begins a journey that will take her back to the bosom of her family, to the half-Sioux lover of her youth, and to a pioneering great-grandfather whose journals recount the bloody annihilation of the Plains Indians.

Award-winning historian Michael Wallis has spent several years re-creating the rich, anecdotal saga of Billy the Kid (1859-1881), a deeply mythologized young man who became a legend in his own time and yet remains an enigma to this day. With the Gilded Age in full swing and the Industrial Revolution reshaping the American landscape, "the Kid", who was gunned down by Sheriff Pat Garrett in the New Mexico Territory at the age of 21, became a new breed of celebrity outlaw.

Esther Safran Foer grew up in a home where the past was too terrible to speak of. The child of parents who were each the sole survivors of their respective families, for Esther the Holocaust loomed in the backdrop of daily life, felt but never discussed. The result was a childhood marked by painful silences and continued tragedy. Even as she built a successful career, married, and raised three children, Esther always felt herself searching.

It was the most famous bank robbery of all time, involving the legendary James-Younger gang's final shocking holdup - the infamous Northfield Raid - and the thrilling two-week chase that followed. Mark Lee Gardner, author of the critically acclaimed To Hell on a Fast Horse, takes us inside Northfield's First National Bank and outside to the streets as Jesse James and his band of outlaws square off against the heroic citizens who risked their lives to defeat America's most daring criminals.

Brilliantly told, Revolver brings the brazenly ambitious and profoundly innovative industrialist and leader Samuel Colt to vivid life. In the space of his 47 years, he seemingly lived five lives: He traveled, womanized, drank prodigiously, smuggled guns to Russia, bribed politicians, and supplied the Union Army with the guns they needed to win the Civil War. Colt lived during an age of promise and progress, but also of slavery, corruption, and unbridled greed, and he not only helped to create this America, he completely embodied it.