A history of the settlement and development of the townships of Brushy Lake and Hickory Ridge and of the emergence of the town of Hickory ridge, all located within the state of Arkansas. The time span covered begins with the discovery of America and comes forth to about the year 2000. It includes such events as DeSoto's trek through the area, transfer of ownership via the Louisiana Purchase, regional exploration and surveying, territorial politics and gaining the status of statehood. Follo...

Was Roger Williams too pure for the Puritans, and what does that have to do with Rhode Island? Why did Augustine Herman take ten years to complete the map that established Delaware? How did Rocky Mountain rogues help create the state of Colorado? All this and more is explained in Mark Stein's new book.How the States Got Their Shapes Too follows How the States Got Their Shapes looks at American history through the lens of its borders, but, while How The States Got Their Shapes told ...

Mary Austin's "The Land of Little Rain" is a lyrical exploration of the natural beauty and stark realities of the high desert of California. Through a series of evocative essays, Austin masterfully intertwines the landscape's physicality with its cultural and spiritual significance to native peoples and settlers alike. Her keen observations render the region's flora and fauna not merely as backdrop but as integral characters in the unfolding narrative, reflecting her empathetic engagement ...

In Blue Sky Dream: A Memoir of America’s Fall from Grace, award-winner David Beers offers a powerful, personal vision of the rise and fall of the American middle class. Here is a dazzling literary chronicle of a family, a people, and a nation: the “blue sky tribe” of ever-optimistic middle-class Americans who believed in something called the American Dream, then woke up one day to discover it was gone. Blue Sky Dream is a book incredibly rich in ideas, in ways of...

The Texas Argonauts were on the march west as early as January, 1849 —a remarkable circumstance when it is recalled that the famous tea caddy of gold dust which set off the gold fever in the “States” did not reach Washington, D. C, until December 7, 1848. From Brownsville, Corpus Christi, and San Antonio, the dusty trails of the gold seekers crisscrossed through West Texas and northern Mexico. Among the travelers was young attorney Benjamin Butler Harris, who joined the fifty-two man Duval...

When the Russians first came to the island of Unalaska, they were told that a vast country lay to the eastward and that its name was Al-ay-ek-sa. Their own island the Aleuts called Nagun-Alayeksa, meaning "the land lying near Alayeksa."The Russians in time came to call the country itself Alashka; the peninsula, Aliaska; and the island, Unalashka. Alaska is an English corruption of the original name.

The first major study of slavery in the maritime South, The Waterman’s Song chronicles the world of slave and free black fishermen, pilots, rivermen, sailors, ferrymen, and other laborers who, from the colonial era through Reconstruction, plied the vast inland waters of North Carolina from the Outer Banks to the upper reaches of tidewater rivers. Demonstrating the vitality and significance of this local African American maritime culture, David Cecelski also reveals its connections...

Local government is the hidden leviathan of American politics: it accounts for nearly a tenth of gross domestic product, it collects nearly as much in taxes as the federal government, and its decisions have an enormous impact on Americans' daily lives. Yet political scientists have few explanations for how people vote in local elections, particularly in the smaller cities, towns, and suburbs where most Americans live. Drawing on a wide variety of data sources and case studies, this book of...

The Boundary Waters region of Minnesota and Ontario is a vast wilderness of quiet beauty, visited and loved by many, but home to only a rugged few. In 1928, Justine Kerfoot arrived, a Northwestern University graduate student headed for medical school until her family lost both their Illinois homes in the stock market crash. Thrust into year-round life at her mother's fledgling summer resort, Justine was confronted with learning survival in the frigid north woods, a challenge she met with e...

The New History in an Old Museum is an exploration of "historical truth" as presented at Colonial Williamsburg. More than a detailed history of a museum and tourist attraction, it examines the packaging of American history, and consumerism and the manufacturing of cultural beliefs. Through extensive fieldwork—including numerous site visits, interviews with employees and visitors, and archival research—Richard Handler and Eric Gable illustrate how corporate sensibility blends with ...

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...

MAKING THE ROUNDS shares the stories and insights of a compassionate doctor who practiced family medicine in the small working-class town of Markle, Indiana. This memoir develops the idea that, as a standard of health, communal wholeness is as important as individual wholeness, that health involves the sense of belonging to others and a place. The authors emphasize the need for doctors to see one life story in relation to other life stories, and, to that end, relevant and interesting town ...