history, local

"In this important and moving true story of reconciliation after war, beautifully illustrated in watercolor, a Japanese pilot bombs the continental U.S. during WWII--the only enemy ever to do so--and comes back 20 years later to apologize"--Provided by publisher.

At the height of the California Gold Rush in 1849, a wagon train of men, women, children and their animals stumbled into a one hundred-and-thirty-mile-long valley in the Mojhave Desert. Barren and hostile, with a dry and unearthly surface of white salts, they became hopelessly lost. After killing the oxen for food, they prepared to die until a twenty-nine-year-old hero, William Lewis Manly, volunteered to cross the desert and attempt to get help. Forty-five years later, Manly told his tale in a book first published in 1894. At his death in Los Angeles in 1903, he had been a miner, rancher, merchant, farmer, pioneer and adventurer and had helped to open the American West.

American Mimi Schwartz grew up on her father's stories about life in a small village in Germany where, before Hitler, "everybody got along." She never took the stories seriously. Many years later she heard a story of the Torah, from that very same village, being rescued by Christians on Kristallnacht in 1938. It was then that Schwartz realized what her father's stories meant, and she began a twelve-year quest to search the historical records and talk with those who remembered that time. How, this book asks, do we deal with evil and remain humane, when, as in the Nazi years, hate rules?.

Examines early communities in the United States, exploring the preserved remnants of such settlements as Lewis and Clark's winter encampment in Oregon, Fort Larned in Kansas, and Grand Portage National Monument in Minnesota.

An overview of interesting and fun places throughout the United States of America.

Covering 20,000 miles of U.S. roads, Dale Peterson drove with his kids, Britt and Bayne, from Start, Louisiana, to Deadhorse, Alaska, in search of small-town America in the "garage sale of the open highway." Along the way they explored open spaces, wild places, and country back roads and met people who weren't afraid to talk to one another. Collected here are the landscapes, landmarks, faces, thoughts, and conversations of a sentimental, idiosyncratic, and often hilarious American odyssey. Storyville, USA is a long winding trip into the back roads of the country and a longer one into the hinterland of our own hearts.