In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, northern resort towns were in their heyday as celebrated retreats for America's wealthy. "Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August" documents the experiences of African Americans in Saratoga Springs, New York, and Newport, Rhode Island--towns that provided a recurring season of expanded employment opportunities, enhanced social life, cosmopolitan experience, and, in a good year, enough money to last through the winter.
 
Affirming that the decision to live in their tiny resort communities was conscious and deliberate, Myra B. Young Armstead shows how Afro-Saratogians and Afro-Newporters organized their rhythms, their routines, and their communities to create meaningful identities for themselves.
Living on streets close to their churches, developing social organizations that promoted their standards of gentility and respectability, and lobbying for wider opportunities, these African Americans actively shaped their lives within the structures and limitations imposed on them.
Armstead situates the resort town between the poles of the rural South and the large industrial cities of the North. She shows how these small northern towns, with their seasonal economic rhythms and domestic wage work, permitted an important continuity between rural and urban lifestyles and a path from rural South to urban North besides the jarring, disruptive journey that often ended in the ghetto.
 
"Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August" tells a story that is at once American and uniquely African American: a story of economic imperatives and enlarged social aspirations culminating in a season--June, July, and August--that brought blacks as close as they could get to the American Dream.     
 

In 1871, General William Jackson Palmer, a Civil War cavalry hero, dreamed of a Rocky Mountain resort town where sedate, temperate, wealthy folk could enjoy life in tranquil comfort. From its inception as a tiny resort hamlet, Colorado Springs has grown into the second largest city in the Colorado Rockies, with a projected population by 1990 of 400,000. Marshall Sprague tells the remarkable and colorful story of a community that, despite its massive growth, never abandoned its original vision of comfort and gentility. His account, illustrated with rare archival photographs, has been revised and enlarged for the 1990s. In the town's early years, rich easterners and Englishmen came seeking adventure, romance, and gentility. But when gold was discovered at nearby Cripple Creek in 1900, Colorado Springs became an instant boom town. A second major boom came several decades later, when local boosters persuaded the Army to choose Colorado Springs as the site for Fort Carson, a training center for 30,000 troops. Other military projects followed, including Peterson Field, Ent Air Force Base, the underground North American Air Defense Command Combat Operations Center, and in 1954, the U.S. Air Force Academy. More recent projects, discussed in a new final chapter, include the Olympic Training Center and the Olympic Hall of Fame, as well as high-tech industries and advances in culture, education, and recreation.

As the city sprawls eastward onto the prairie, it bears little resemblance to General Palmer's 1871 village. Yet the general's dream of a quality town in a quality environment has continued to inspire generations of administrators and boosters who have made Colorado Springs a model of urban prosperity.

Nineteenth-century New England was a hostile place for Catholics. In Massachusetts a mob torched a convent; in Maine a priest was tarred and feathered; and Rhode Island elected an anti-Catholic Know Nothing governor. “No Irish Need Apply” signs were common.

Newport was different. It was a religiously diverse and tolerant city that welcomed Catholic French troops during the American Revolution. Later, as it became the favored summer retreat for America’s Protestant social elite, Irish Catholics arrived to work in construction jobs, the tourist economy, and the grand Gilded Age cottages. By the end of the century, Newport’s Catholic community was flourishing. Moneyed Catholics acquired their own mansions, an Irish Catholic was mayor, and prominent Protestants were helping Catholic neighbors establish new schools and churches. In this deeply researched study, John F. Quinn delves into this rich Catholic history to discover why nineteenth-century Newport was particularly religiously tolerant and accepting.

Rock and roll pioneer and Newport native Sonny Burgess is a member of the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. In this book full of personal interviews and remembrances, Burgess and his band tell of their original recordings for Sun Records in the 1950s; their shows with greats such as Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis; and their success in the contemporary rockabilly revival. This also is the history of a once prominent and spirited Delta community of extensive agricultural wealth. Newport was home to numerous music clubs that hosted national artists as well as illicit backroom gambling. Burgess is a product of this history, and his vivacious music is shaped by his hometown and the dramatic transformation of southern rural life it witnessed.