With the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Theodore Roosevelt resigned his post as assistant secretary of the navy to recruit the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry. The legendary Rough Riders-an unlikely combination of cowboys, frontiersmen, Native Americans, African-Americans, and Ivy League alumni-trained in Texas before shipping off to Cuba. The regiment met their enemy in the tropical summer heat, fighting rain, mud, and malaria as well as the...

This is the most comprehensive volume of Walt Whitman (1819-1892) ever published. It includes all of his poetry and what he considered his complete prose. This is also the only collection that includes, in exactly the form in which it appeared in 1855, the first edition of Leaves of Grass. This was the book, a commercial failure, that prompted Emerson's famous message to Whitman: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career". These twelve poems,...

"These three early novels are stirring romances of the South Seas; many of these fictional details resemble some of the events in Melville's own life in the early 1840s"--Jacket.