Includes information on Chivalry Democrats, Jefferson Davis, Democratic Party, Stephen A. Douglas, free soil movement, John C. Fremont, Know Nothing Party, Mexico and Mexicans, James K. Polk, Republican Party, Sacramento, San Francisco, secession, Zachary Taylor, Transcontinental Railroad, Whig Party, etc.

The previously untold story of the violence in Congress that helped spark the Civil War. In The Field of Blood, Joanne B. Freeman recovers the long-lost story of physical violence on the floor of the U.S. Congress. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, she shows that the Capitol was rife with conflict in the decades before the Civil War. Legislative sessions were often punctuated by mortal threats, canings, flipped desks, and all-out slugfests....

A renowned journalist and cohost of NPR's Morning Edition presents a thrilling narrative history of President Andrew Jackson and Cherokee Chief John Ross--two heroic yet tragically opposed men whose actions decided the fate of states and Indian nations in America at a moment of transition. Five decades after the Revolutionary War, the United States approached a constitutional crisis. At its center stood two former military comrades locked in a struggle...