Books in the Nature and Culture in America series

Prior to the great Klondike Gold Rush of 1897, travelers returned from Alaska's Inside Passage with fascinating accounts of its wonders. Historian Robert Campbell demonstrates how these tourists served as shock troops of the gold rush by portraying Alaska as a "Last West" ripe for American conquest.

Empire of Vines traces the development of wine culture as grape growing expanded from New York to the Midwest before gaining ascendancy in California-a progression that illustrates viticulture's centrality to the nineteenth-century American projects of national expansion and the formation of a national culture.