Ranging from the dawn of the silent era to today's blockbusters and independent films, this revamped second edition chronicles the significant contributions by Chicago and Chicagoans to more than a century of American filmmaking. Among the Windy City's unique honors in this history are the development of film technology by early major players Essanay Film Manufacturing Company and the Selig Polyscope Company; the first African American–owned and operated film studios; the birthplace of gor...

"With the meticulous attention to detail of a historian and a storyteller's eye for human drama, Bernstein shines a beam of truth on a forgotten American tragedy. Heartbreaking and riveting."---Gregg Olsen, New York Times best-selling author of Starvation Heights"A chilling and historic character study of the unfathomable suffering that desperation and fury, once unleashed inside a twisted mind, can wreak on a small town. Contemporary mass murderers Timothy...

The new edition of this Michigan Notable Book includes a new introduction and stories from interviews with two additional survivors, Myrna (Gates) Coulter and Ralph Witchell, which took place after the first edition was published in 2009.On May 18, 1927, the small town of Bath, Michigan, was forever changed when Andrew Kehoe set off a cache of explosives concealed in the basement of the local school. Thirty-eight children and six adults were dead, among them Kehoe, who had literall...

The stunning Hunger Games trilogy is complete! The extraordinary, ground breaking New York Times bestsellers The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, along with the third book in The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay, are available for the first time ever in e-book. Stunning, gripping, and powerful.

To European explorers, it was Eden, a paradise of waist-high grasses, towering stands of walnut, maple, chestnut, and oak, and forests that teemed with bears, wolves, raccoons, beavers, otters, and foxes. Today, it is the site of Broadway and Wall Street, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, and the home of millions of people, who have come from every corner of the nation and the globe. In Gotham, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have produced a monumental work of...

The true story of a family's fight for their educational future in "a sure-to-be-classic account of 1960s desegregation" ( Los Angeles Times ).With an Introduction by New York Times –bestselling author Marian Wright Edelman"The most important thing we can give our children is an education." —Mae Bertha CarterIn 1965, the Carters, an Afric...

When Daniel Hunter and Jethro Heiko began planning at a kitchen table, they knew that their movement would be outspent by hundreds of millions of dollars. They were up against powerful elected officials, private investigators, hired thugs, and the state supreme court. Even before they started, newspapers concluded the movement had no chance.This riveting David versus Goliath story is a rare first-person narrative, giving unparalled access to the behind-the-scenes of campaigns: the ...

When the tornado roared across southern Missouri, southern Illinois, and southwestern Indiana for many hours during the afternoon on March 18th in 1925, there was now way that people along the tornado path would know it was occurring before they could see it. This was because there was no radar systems then and the National Weather Service was not able to let people know that a tornado was going to occur or that there was a tornado already occurring since they did not know much about torna...

The reader of this book will be taken on a fascinating journey from the earliest days of the historic Robinson plantation of 150 years ago, to its present day name of the West River Plantation. Carved out of the wilderness of east Texas , the estate rose to immense prosperity during the industrial revolution, only to fall into inevitable decline and tragedy. Reduced to a few acres, and the home in disrepair in the late 1970s, the estate would be sold to the West family. The era of the once...

FAMILY STORIES FROM THE ATTIC is an anthology of essays, creative nonfiction, and poetry inspired by family letters, objects, and archives. Nearly two dozen contributors from the United States and Australia tell stories of immigration and migration, loss, discovery, secrets, questions, love, and the search for meaning and identity. Editors Christi Craig and Lisa Rivero bring together both experienced and new authors who will prompt writers and non-writers alike to think about their own fam...

In 2003, Ohio celebrated the bicentennial of its inauguration as the seventeenth state of the United States. It incited citizens from eighty-eight counties to celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of Ohios heritage.In his memoir, author Keith A. Elkins, known as Mr. E. to his fourth-grade students, tells of how, inspired by his states momentous celebration, he discovered an opportunity to animate his original puppet production, G. C.s Loose Caboose Revue. In 1999, leading up to O...

Alexander Edwin Sweet (1841-1901) is Texas's own "Sifter," whose humorous columns appeared in the Galveston Daily News in the late 1870s and early 1880s. In his wickedly funny, tongue-in-cheek sketches, readers learned of an astonishing variety of frontier phenomena, some familiar, others downright odd. For example, there was the typical nineteenth-century custom of New Year's Day receptions for bachelor guests only, with refreshments consisting largely of strong drink and equally...