Two months after the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in February 1898, Congress authorized President McKinley to recruit a volunteer army to drive the Spaniards from Cuba. From this army emerged the legendary "Rough Riders," a mounted regiment drawn from America's western territories and led by the indomitable Theodore Roosevelt. Its ranks included not only cowboys and other westerners, but several Ivy Leaguers and clubmen, many of them...

"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...

Recalls the forgotten political debate at the beginning of the twentieth century over America's role in the world, with the country's political and intellectual leaders advocating either imperial expansion or restraint.

"The Rio Grande Valley south of Albuquerque, commonly referred to as the Rio Abajo, is a treasure trove of legends, stories, and characters. In 'Murder, Mystery and Mayhem,' the first volume of this series, the readers were introduced to characters such as Bronco Bill Walters, Solomon Luna, and Jose Francisco Chavez. Readers joined in the chase for the Abo Canyon Gang, recoiled at the stories of airplane crashes, and anguished over the unsolved kidnapping...