The story of the Taylors of Tennessee offers a perspective that is as entertaining as it is instructive. Many of the major themes of the broader story are here in abundance, enlivened by the triumphs and travails of some of the individuals who helped to make this land ours-and yours. W. Eugene Cox and Joyce Cox demonstrate how the thread of family connects past to present. In the process, they bring to life an American history full to overflowing with challenges and opportunities.

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...

**Winner of the Chicago Tribune‘s 2013 Heartland PrizeA critically acclaimed history of Chicago at mid-century, featuring many of the incredible personalities that shaped American culture**Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to-coast journey included a stop in Chicago, and this flow of people and commodities made it the crucible for American culture and innovation. In luminous prose, Chicago native Thomas Dyja re-creates the story of the city in i...

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 ...

Chronicles of the Revolutionary War organizes the events of the tumultuous birth of the United States into easily read, short chapters.These chapters enliven the story of the American Revolution and capture the spirit of Americas patriot forebears with a balanced account that also respects their British and Tory antagonists.Ideal for students, or even for reading aloud at meetings of historical societies, the book received its inspiration from Patriot Medal recipient Clarence M. C...

An insider's "indispensible" behind-the-scenes history of the transit system of San Francisco and surrounding counties ( Houston Chronicle).In the first-ever history book about BART, longtime agency spokesman Michael C. Healy gives an insider's account of the rapid transit system's inception, hard-won approval, construction, and operations, warts and all.With a master storyteller's wit and sharp attention to detail, Healy recreates the politically ...

In 1952, just one year after Coach Adolph Rupp's University of Kentucky Wildcats won their third national championship in four years, an unlikely high school basketball team from rural Graves County, Kentucky, stole the spotlight and the media's attention. Inspired by young coach Jack Story and by the Harlem Globetrotters, the Cuba Cubs grabbed headlines when they rose from relative obscurity to defeat the big-city favorite and win the state championship. A classic underdog tale, The G...

The handsome multicolored streetcar is a nostalgic icon of the some of the most romantic and heritage-rich locales in America, including San Francisco, New Orleans and Chicago, immortalised on stage and screen in classics including 'Meet Me In St Louis' and 'A Streetcar Named Desire'. Streetcars of America chronicles these vehicles from the earliest animal-drawn carriages to the height of their popularity in the 1920s, when there were more than 1,200 tram railways, to the turning of the ti...

This fast-paced narrative traces the emergence of the United States Navy as a global power from its birth during the American Revolution through to its current superpower status. The story highlights iconic moments of great drama pivotal to the nation's fortunes: John Paul Jones' attacks on the British in the Revolution, the Barbary Wars, and the arduous conquest of Iwo Jima. The book illuminates the changes--technological, institutional, and functional--of the U.S. Navy from its days as a...

John T. Farnham, a sharpshooter in the Union Army, wrote a substantial diary entry nearly every day during his three-year enlistment, sent over 50 long articles to his hometown newspaper, and mailed some 600 letters home. He described training, battles, skirmishes, encampments, furloughs, marches, hospital life, and clerkships at the Iron Brigade headquarters and the War Department. He met Lincoln and acquired a blood-stained cuff taken from his assassinated body. He befriended freed slave...

Ghostly footsteps and flickering lights, a silhouette in the window of an abandoned building, a restless presence at the scene of a sunken ship, spectral wails and poltergeist theft of office supplies, mythical Native American legends, and other paranormal happenings scattered across the Alaskan panhandle come together in Spirits of Southeast Alaska, a grand adventure into the historical hauntings of the southeastern corner of the Last Frontier.Author James P. Devereaux lived in Al...

THE LAST SOUL OF WITHERSPOON takes a global approach in its history of the school.Readers will find this book to be autobiographical as well as a social history told on three levels.Herein is a story of a person from Long Shoal in Lee County, Kentucky, whose childhood innocence collides head-on with adolescence while a student in the mountain settlement school of Witherspoon. Readers will find at the end of the story a battle-scarred but still standing youth, heading off to t...