In the early days of 1937, the Ohio River, swollen by heavy winter rains, began rising. And rising. And rising. By the time the waters crested, the Ohio and Mississippi had climbed to record heights. Nearly four hundred people had died, while a million more had run from their homes. The deluge caused more than half a billion dollars of damage at a time when the Great Depression still battered the nation.Timed to coincide with the flood's seventy-fifth anniversary, The Thousand-Y...

Fully revised, updated, and extended, the fifth edition of Hollywood’s America provides an important compilation of interpretive essays and primary documents that allows students to read films as cultural artifacts within the contexts of actual past events.A new edition of this classic textbook, which ties movies into the broader narrative of US and film historyThis fifth edition contains nine new chapters, with a greater overall emphasis on recent film his...

A Booklist Best Literary Travel Book (2017) and Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book (2016)“A penetrating study of human character in a challenging environment. . . . [David Welky’s] seamless narrative, chilling at times and always thought-provoking, transports the reader to a time when the Arctic was virtually as harsh and inaccessible a place as the Moon or Mars.” —Natural HistoryFrom a snow-swept hill in the ice fields northwest ...

In an age when polar exploration was akin to space exploration today, Sir John Franklin's journeys of discovery captured the popular imagination. Originally published in 1859, Thirty Years in the Arctic Regions is Franklin's own record of his two overland expeditions, begun in 1816 and 1825, which took him to what is now the Northwest Territory of Canada.But it was Franklin's final expedition, to discover the sea route connecting the northern Atlantic and Pacific oceans, that cemented his ...

Scottish doctor and explorer John Rae is a controversial figure in the history of the Arctic. He began his career with the Hudson's Bay Company as a surgeon in Moose Factory, Ontario, where he learned to survey, live off the land, and travel great distances on snowshoes. These skills served him well when, in 1846, he was charged with completing the geography of the northern shore of North America and set out on his first expedition. Some years later, while exploring the Boothia Peninsula i...

For centuries, colonial powers searched for a sea passage that would link the Arctic and Pacific Oceans. The route, known as the Northwest Passage, would cut thousands of miles from sea travel and open up commercial trade to and from Asia. There were numerous expeditions to find the passage, though none successful. It was while searching for one of these failed expeditions—the Franklin Expedition—that Captain Robert McClure and his crew aboard the HMS Investigator became the first...

Two founding fathers of American industry. One desire to dominate business at any price.“Masterful . . . Standiford has a way of making the 1890s resonate with a twenty-first-century audience.”—USA Today“The narrative is as absorbing as that of any good novel—and as difficult to put down.”—Miami HeraldThe author of Last Train to Paradise tells the riveting story of Andrew Carnegie, Henry C...

This cultural history is a "well-reported account of the men and women who created the comic book and the backlash of the 1950s that nearly destroyed it" ( Entertainment Weekly ).In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture as we know it was first created—in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. No sooner had this new culture emerged than it was ...

John R. Jewitt's story of being captured and enslaved by Maquinna, the great chief of the Mowachaht people, is both an adventure tale of survival and an unusual perspective on the First Nations of the northwest coast of Vancouver Island.On March 22, 1803, while anchored in Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, the Boston was attacked by a group of Mowachaht warriors. Twenty-five of her 27 crewmen were massacred, their heads "arranged in a line" for survivor John R. Je...

FROM THE WORLDS OF BUSINESS, POLITICS, HISTORY, LITERATURE, ENTERTAINMENT, AND MORE . . ."Think how much happier women would be if, instead of endlessly fretting about what the males in their lives are thinking, they could relax, secure in the knowledge that the correct answer is: very little."--DAVE BARRY"I'd tell you what I really thought about the national media, but as my good friend Dana Carvey would say, 'Wouldn't be prudent. Not gonna do it.' "--GEORGE ...

“The Canada Exploration Anthology”, features texts from Henry Hudson, Samuel de Champlain, Rene-Robert Chevalier de la Salle, Samuel Hearne, Alexander MacKenzie, David Thompson, John Rae. It also contains a wealth of pictures, photographs maps and diagrams pertaining to each of the 7 books included in this huge volume.The Anthology tells the tale of the discovery and exploration of Canada by European explorers and settlers, and by the early pioneers of the age. The texts have been ...

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Lillian Smith Award.An American epic of science, politics, race, honor, high society, and the Mississippi River, Rising Tide tells the riveting and nearly forgotten story of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. The river inundated the homes of almost one million people, helped elect Huey Long governor and made Herbert Hoover president, drove hundred...