The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

	Additional resources for this issue of History Now The Salem Witch Trials The Barbary Pirates William Walker Teapot Dome

The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. New York: Knopf, 2009.

This book, published just a year ago, focuses entirely on Vanderbilt’s Nicaraguan undertakings:

Dando-Collins, Stephen. Tycoon's War: How Cornelius Vanderbilt Invaded a Country to Overthrow America's Most Famous Military Adventurer. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, c2008.

I’m surprised that that there aren’t more recent book length studies of Walker. These are the best I can do:

Carr, Albert H.Z. The World and William Walker. New York, Harper & Row, 1963.

Greene, Laurence. The Filibuster: The Career of William Walker. Indianapolis, New York, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, c1937.

Luckily, I can offer a healthier list of books on the filibusters in general:

Brown, Charles Henry. Agents Of Manifest Destiny: The Lives and Times of the Filibusters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, c1980.

Greenberg, Amy S. Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

May, Robert E. Manifest Destiny's Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America. University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

_____. The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854-1861. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Reprint of May’s famous 1973 study.

Owsley, Frank Lawrence, and Gene A. Smith. Filibusters and Expansionists: Jeffersonian Manifest Destiny, 1800-1821. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, c1997. The precursors of antebellum filibusters.

These studies can enlarge your knowledge of the Mexican War:

Wheelan, Joseph. Invading Mexico: America's Continental Dream and the Mexican War, 1846-1848. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007.

Heidler, David Stephen and Jeanne T. The Mexican War. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, c2006.

Internet Resources:

American Memory isn’t useful for Walker and his associates, but the “California as I Saw It” collection of first-person narratives has a good selection of memoirs of travel across the Panamanian Isthmus in the 1850s when that rail service became a motive for the filibusters – and Vanderbilt. Go to their search screen and do word searches on Nicaragua and Panama.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/calbkquery.html

The Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs online catalog has some very interesting images – some of them reproduced in this issue’s interactive feature. At their search screen, search for “William Walker” for portraits of this filibuster. Then search on “Frank Leslie’s” paired with terms like Nicaragua, Nicaraguan filibuster, William Walker, etc., to retrieve reproductions of illustrations from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper for the late 1850s.

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/pphome.html

From another branch of “LC,” the Federal Research Division, go to the website for Tim Merrill, ed., Nicaragua: A Country Study. Washington: GPO, 1993. The chapter “Foreign Intervention, 1850-68” provides a clear overview of Nicaraguan domestic politics and foreign relations for these years. I apologize for not mentioning earlier the Library’s Country Studies/Area Handbook Series sponsored by the US Department of the Army between 1986 and 1998. They’re all online at this site, providing a marvelous introduction to the history of the nations that they cover:

http://countrystudies.us/nicaragua/

I’ll close by introducing another Internet resource that may be new to you – the Internet Archive. Founded in 1996 and headquartered in San Francisco. Right now, the books represented in the “Texts” section of the Archive have an understandably California-oriented flavor, but that works well for us and the filibusters. Take advantage of the “Advanced Search” option on this page:

http://www.archive.org/details/texts

and paste in author or title of these hard-to-get pre-1920 books about Walker:

Doubleday, Charles William. Reminiscences of the “Filibuster” War in Nicaragua. New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1886.

Lucas, Daniel Bedinger. Nicaragua: War of the Filibusters. Richmond: B. F. Johnson Pub. Co., 1896.

Oliphant, Laurence. Patriots and Filibusters: Or, Incidents of Political and Exploratory Travel. Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1860.

Roche, James Jeffrey. The Story of the Filibusters. London: T.F. Unwin, 1891.

Scroggs, William O. Filibusters and Financiers: The Story of William Walker and His Associates. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1916.

Walker, William. The War in Nicaragua. Mobile: S.H. Goetzel, 1860.