Probably no American journalist, man or woman, has had a more extraordinary career than Grace Halsell. Before President Lyndon Johnson personally hired her to work in the White House, Halsell had, over a period of two decades, written her way around the world - Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Orient, and the Americas.Born on the windswept plains of West Texas, Halsell was encouraged from the age of five by her pioneer father, who had led cattle drives on the Chisolm Trail, "to...

Over 3,000 dead. Buildings shaken to the ground. A city, surrounded by water, burnt to the ground. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was one of the most destructive natural disasters the world has ever known.In the aftermath of the Earthquake, authorities learned the hard way that the city was vastly unprepared for any disaster. Find out what happened and how the city was repaired in this fascinating book.HistoryCaps is an imprint of BookCaps Study Guides; with dozens of...

In "Indian Depredations in Texas," John Wesley Wilbarger crafts a meticulous historical narrative that chronicles the tumultuous encounters between Native American tribes and early Texan settlers during the 19th century. Employing a detailed documentary style, Wilbarger incorporates firsthand accounts, personal experiences, and a rich array of primary sources to provide readers with an immersive exploration of this often-overlooked aspect of American history. The book situates itself withi...

When did English become American? What distinctive qualities made it American? What role have America's democratizing impulses, and its vibrantly heterogeneous speakers, played in shaping our language and separating it from the mother tongue? A wide-ranging account of American English, Richard Bailey's Speaking American investigates the history and continuing evolution of our language from the sixteenth century to the present. The book is organized in half-century segments around ...

Who among us cannot testify to the possibilities of the night? To the mysterious, shadowed intersections of music, smoke, money, alcohol, desire, and dream? The hours between dusk and dawn are when we are most urgently free, when high meets low, when tongues wag, when wallets loosen, when uptown, downtown, rich, poor, black, white, gay, straight, male, and female so often chance upon one another. Night is when we are more likely to carouse, fornicate, fall in love, murder,...

The Tragedy at the Loomis Street Crossing After five years of intense research, Author Chuck Spinner has written the definitive story of the Naperville Train Wreck of April 25, 1946. He has uncovered the histories of the 45 victims of the tragedy, interviewed two surviving eye witnesses of the event, and talked with survivors and helpers at the scene. His family lived just a block from the crossing where the accident occurred. Spinner was born at St. Charles Hospital in Aurora, Illinois on...

Richard Dillon, one of California’s premier historians, tells the compelling story of San Francisco’s exotic pre-1906 Chinatown when vicious hoodlum gangs held sway. Chinatown, as demonstrated by Dillon’s fast-paced narrative, became a cauldron of chaos teeming with thugs, prostitutes, gamblers, and warlords preying on scores of helpless victims. .As the Tong Wars ripped through San Francisco’s Chinatown, the Chinese inhabitants lived under a reign of terror. Opium was abundant as ...

"For four hundred years Florida has been North America's ranking treasure hunt, a national Never-Never land.""For four hundred years Florida has been North America's ranking treasure hunt, a national Never-Never land."Gloria Jahoda unfolds the colorful story in this book, from the gold-seeking conquistadores of Spain, and the alleged search for a fountain of youth, to today's vast influx of tourists and the retired in search of sun, health, and the delights...

The events of December 7, 1941, rocked the lives of people around the world. The bombing of Pearl Harbor had intimate repercussions, too, especially in the territory of Hawaii. In Love and War recounts the wartime experiences of author Melody M. Miyamoto Walters’s grandparents, two second-generation Japanese Americans, or Nisei, living in Hawaii. Their love story, narrated in letters they wrote each other from July 1941 to June 1943, offers a unique view of Hawaiian Nisei and the ...

Across the Plains to Colorado and A Stage Ride to Colorado, two first person accounts, showcase the beauty and troubles of travel across the American continent in the mid 19th century.

For more than a century, the term “Main Street” has conjured up nostalgic images of American small-town life. Representations exist all around us, from fiction and film to the architecture of shopping malls and Disneyland. All the while, the nation has become increasingly diverse, exposing tensions within this ideal. In The Death and Life of Main Street, Miles Orvell wrestles with the mythic allure of the small town in all its forms, illustrating how Americans continue to reinscri...

In Nearly Forgotten: Seventh-day Adventists in Jamaica, Vermont, and Their Place in Vermont History, Floyd Greenleaf traces the birth of not only the local Seventh-day Adventist congregation in the rural township of Jamaica but also the rise of the Seventh-day Adventist movement itself, with its roots in Millerism and the development of second-advent and Sabbath theology. Greenleaf explores the complex and dynamic relationship between the trajectory of the church and a multitude o...