This work examines the interplay between the city of Sacramento and the Catholic Church since the 1850s. Avella uses Sacramento as a case study of the role of religious denominations in the development of the American West. In Sacramento, as in other western urban areas, churches brought civility and various cultural amenities, and they helped to create an atmosphere of stability so important to creating a viable urban community. At the same time, churches often had to shape themselves to the secularizing tendencies of western cities while trying to remain faithful to their core values and practices.

Besides the numerous institutions that the Church sponsored, it brought together a wide spectrum of the city’s diverse ethnic populations and offered them several routes to assimilation. Catholic Sacramentans have always played an active role in government and in the city’s economy, and Catholic institutions provided a matrix for the creation of new communities as the city spread into neighboring suburbs. At the same time, the Church was forced to adapt itself to the needs and demands of its various ethnic constituents, particularly the flood of Spanish-speaking newcomers in the late twentieth century.

The Sacred Causeof Union highlights Iowans’ important role in reuniting the nation when the battle over slavery tore it asunder. In this first-ever survey of the state’s Civil War history, Thomas Baker interweaves economics, politics, army recruitment, battlefield performance, and government administration. Scattered across more than a dozen states and territories, Iowa’s fighting men marched long distances and won battles against larger rebel armies despite having little food or shelter and sometimes poor equipment. On their own initiative, the state’s women ventured south to the battlefields to tend to the sick and injured, and farm families produced mountains of food to feed hungry federal armies. In the absence of a coordinated military supply system, women’s volunteer organizations were instrumental in delivering food, clothing, medicines, and other supplies to those who needed them. All of these efforts contributed mightily to the Union victory and catapulted Iowa into the top circle of most influential states in the nation.

To shed light on how individual Iowans experienced the war, the book profiles six state residents. Three were well-known. Annie Wittenmyer, a divorced woman with roots in Virginia, led the state’s efforts to ship clothing and food to the soldiers. Alexander Clark, a Muscatine businessman and the son of former slaves, eloquently championed the rights of African Americans. Cyrus Carpenter, a Pennsylvania-born land surveyor anxious to make his fortune, served in the army and then headed the state’s Radical Republican faction after the war, ultimately being elected governor.

Three never became famous. Ben Stevens, a young, unemployed carpenter, fought in an Iowa regiment at Shiloh, and then transferred to a Louisiana African American regiment so that he could lead the former slaves into battle. Farm boy Abner Dunham defended the Sunken Road at the Battle of Shiloh, before spending seven grim months in Confederate prison camps. The young Charles Musser faced pressure from his neighbors to enlist and from his parents to remain at home to work on the farm. Soon after he signed on to serve the Union, he discovered that his older brother had joined the Confederate Army. Through the letters and lives of these six Iowans, Thomas Baker shows how the Civil War transformed the state at the same time that Iowans transformed the nation.
 

Every American is co-owner of the most magnificent estate in the world—federal public forests, grazing lands, monuments, national parks, wildlife refuges, and other public places. The writer Wallace Stegner famously referred to public lands as “America’s best idea,” but there have always been some who oppose the idea for ideological reasons, or because they have a vested economic interest. In the current decade, federal public lands have been under physical threat as never before, with armed standoffs and takeovers that the US government has proved stunningly unsuccessful at prosecuting in federal courts.

One such incident was the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon, in 2016. Armed militants seized the headquarters of the refuge for forty-one days and occupied the community for three months. Militants threatened and harassed local residents, pledging to “give back” the land to unnamed “rightful owners” in their effort to enact a fringe interpretation of the US Constitution.

Drawing on more than two years of intensive fieldwork, Sagebrush Collaboration shows that the militants failed in their objectives because the sensible and hardworking citizens of Harney County had invested decades in collaboratively solving the very problems that the militia used to justify their anti–federal government revolution.

In Sagebrush Collaboration, Peter Walker offers the first book-length study of why the 2016 takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge failed. His nuanced and deeply researched account provides the full context for the takeover, including the response from local and federal officials and the grassroots community resistance. It will be essential reading for years to come for anyone who wants to understand the ongoing battle over the future of America’s public lands.
 

Noted writer and photographer Stephen Trimble mixes eloquent accounts of personal experiences with clear explication of natural history. His photographs capture some of the most spectacular but least-known scenery in the western states. The Great Basin Desert sweeps from the Sierra to the Rockies, from the Snake River Plain to the Mojave Desert. "Biogeography" would be one way to sum up Trimble's focus on the land: what lives where, and why. He introduces concepts of desert ecology and discusses living communities of animals and plants that band Great Basin mountains—from the exhilarating emptiness of dry lake-beds to alpine regions at the summits of the 13,000-foot Basin ranges.

This is the best general introduction to the ecology and spirit of the Great Basin, a place where "the desert almost seems to mirror the sky in size," where mountains hold "ravens, bristlecone pines, winter stillness—and unseen, but satisfying, the possibility of bighorn sheep." Trimble's photographs come from the backcountry of this rugged land, from months of exploring and hiking the Great Basin wilderness in all seasons; and his well-chosen words come from a rare intimacy with the West.

Since its publication in 1996, The Sagebrush State has served as the text for the required course on Nevada’s history and constitution given at the state’s colleges and universities. The third edition of this work is updated through 2005 to include information on the elections of 2002 and 2004 and two very controversial sessions of the legislature. The full text of the state constitution is provided for reference in an appendix and includes extensive annotations that note and explain amendments and other changes made to the original 1864 document.

Nevada’s politics have been formed in large measure by its turbulent history and harsh environment. Bowers’ concise volume explains the dynamics of this process, which is strikingly unique among the fifty states. This is a readable and insightful explanation of how Nevada’s history has formed its political culture, and how its government works today. The Sagebrush State includes the full text of the state constitution, with extensive annotations of all amendments to the original 1864 document. The Sagebrush State serves as a text for the study of Nevada’s history and constitution, which is a graduation requirement at the state’s colleges and universities. The fourth edition of this work is updated through 2012 to include information on the elections of 2010 and 2012 and recent controversial sessions of the Legislature.

Nevada’s politics are in large measure the result of its turbulent history and harsh environment. Michael W. Bowers’ concise volume explains the dynamics of the political formation process, which is strikingly unique among the fifty states.  Even today, Nevada is unlike the other states in its politics and culture: it’s economically right, yet libertarian, the home of widespread gaming and a 24/7 lifestyle, has a high percentage of federally-owned lands, and has one of the highest rates of urbanism in the U.S., yet is often governed by rural legislators.

This comprehensive and insightful explanation discusses how Nevada’s history has shaped its political culture, and how its government operates today. The Sagebrush State serves as a highly readable and accessible text for the study of Nevada’s political history and constitution, which is a graduation requirement at the state’s colleges and universities. The fifth edition is updated through 2017 and includes the full text of the state constitution with extensive annotations of all amendments to the original 1864 document.

Nevada’s politics are in large measure the result of its turbulent history and harsh environment. Michael W. Bowers’s concise volume explains the dynamics of the state’s political formation process, which is strikingly unique among the fifty states. Even today, Nevada is unlike the other states in its politics and culture: economically right, yet libertarian and home to widespread gaming and a 24/7 industry. It has a high percentage of federally owned lands and one of the highest rates of urbanism in the United States, yet is often dominated by rural legislators. 

This comprehensive and insightful explanation discusses how Nevada’s history has shaped its political culture, and how its government operates today. The Sagebrush State serves as a highly readable and accessible text for the study of Nevada’s political history and constitution, which is a graduation requirement at the state’s colleges and universities. The sixth edition is updated through 2020 and includes the latest changes in the selection process of municipal court judges in the state, the resurgence of the Democrats after their losses in 2016, and the full text of the state constitution with extensive annotations of all amendments to the original 1864 document. It also examines the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic downturn on the state’s budget.

The most complete overview and assessment of Mormon village studies available, this volume extends the canon twofold. First, it presents a rich composite view of nineteenth-century Mormon life in the West as seen by qualified observers who did not just pass through but stopped and studied. Second, it connects that early protoethnography to scholarly Mormon village studies in the twentieth century, showing their proper context in the thriving field of community studies. Based mostly on nine famous travelers’ accounts of life among the Mormons, including Richard Burton, Elizabeth Kane, Howard Stansbury, John Gunnison, and Julius Benchley—Bahr’s volume introduces these talented observers, summarizes and analyzes their observation, and constructs a holistic overview of Mormon village life. He concludes by tracing the rise and continuity of Mormon village studies in the twentieth century, beginning with Lowry Nelson’s 1923 research in Escalante, Utah. Over the following three decades, the genre expanded beyond Nelson and his students, becoming more sophisticated and interdisciplinary; by the mid-1950s it was a subfield within the respected arena of community studies. Researchers continued to study Mormon communities in the following decades and into the twenty-first century.

 Drawing from thousands of pages of police reports, court documents, interviews, letters, and diaries, Sillitoe’s and Roberts’s narrative cuts through the complexities of this famous crime investigation to deliver a gripping, Capote-esque tale. They embrace the details but lay them out systematically as seen through the eyes of the detectives, victims, and the perpetrator. The darkest secrets unravel gradually—allowing the reader fleeting glimpses of the infamous white salamander as it ducks in and out of its fabricator’s head.

What was the “salamander letter” and why were so many people determined to possess—and to conceal—it? Why was this one of the most unusual cases in American forensic history?

A skilled con artist by anyone’s assessment, Mark Hofmann eluded exposure by police and document authenticators—the FBI, Library of Congress, the LDS historical department, and polygraph experts—until George Throckmorton discovered the telltale microscopic alligatoring that was characteristic of the forgeries. What ensued was a suspense-ridden cat-and-mouse game between seasoned prosecutors and a clever, homicidal criminal. In the end, this story only verifies that some facts are indeed stranger than fiction.

During the decade of the 1850s, the Oregon Territory progressed toward statehood in an atmosphere of intense political passion and conflict. Editors of rival newspapers blamed a group of young men whom they named the “Salem Clique,” along with the Oregon Statesman newspaper that they controlled, for the bitter party struggles of the time. They accused the so-called Clique of dictatorship and corruption. They charged it with the intention of imposing slavery on the Territory. The Clique, they maintained, even conspired to establish a government separate from the United States, conceivably a “bigamous Mormon republic.”   
 
While not in agreement with some of the more extreme contemporary accusations against the Clique, many historians have concluded that its members were vicious men who were able, because of their command of the Democratic party, to impose their hegemony on the Oregon Territory’s inhabitants. Other scholars have seen them as merely another instance of the contentious politics of the period. 
 
Although the Salem Clique has been given considerable prominence in nearly every account of Oregon’s Territorial period, there has not been a detailed study of its role until now. What sort of people were these men? What was their impact on the issues, events, and movements of the period? What role did they play in the years after Oregon became a state? In The Salem Clique, Historian Barbara Mahoney sets out to answer these and many other questions in this comprehensive and deeply researched history.
 

Each year wild Pacific salmon leave their oceanic feeding grounds and swim hundreds of miles back to their home rivers. The salmon’s annual return is a place-defining event in the Pacific Northwest, with immense ecological, economic, and social significance. However, despite massive spending, efforts to significantly alter the endangered status of salmon have failed.

In Salmon, People, and Place, acclaimed fisheries biologist Jim Lichatowich eloquently exposes the misconceptions underlying salmon management and recovery programs that have fueled the catastrophic decline in Northwest salmon populations for more than a century. These programs will continue to fail, he suggests, so long as they regard salmon as products and ignore their essential relationship with their habitat.

But Lichatowich offers hope. In Salmon, People, and Place he presents a concrete plan for salmon recovery, one based on the myriad lessons learned from past mistakes. What is needed to successfully restore salmon, Lichatowich states, is an acute commitment to healing the relationships among salmon, people, and place.

A significant contribution to the literature on Pacific salmon, Salmon, People, and Place: A Biologist’s Search for Salmon Recovery is an essential read for anyone concerned about the fate of this Pacific Northwest icon.

Ministerial training was an early goal of Mormonism. The priesthood-led institution called the School of the Prophets, established in Kirtland, Ohio, in 1833, was basically a divinity school for prospective missionaries. However, topics of study included, instead of prophecy and revelation, penmanship, English grammar, arithmetic, philosophy, literature, government, geography, and history. For seven weeks there was even a course in Hebrew, but it was discontinued. Still, it was in this setting that Joseph Smith received his revelation on diet and health and some of the spiritual manifestations associated with the Kirtland temple dedication. Brigham Young re-established the school in the Salt Lake Valley in 1867; his successor, John Taylor, resuscitated it for a while in 1883. Young’s emphasis was theology, first as an appendage to Deseret University, and then as a separate institution. Presented here for the first time are all available minutes for the Utah period.

In 1965, soil and climatic studies indicated that the Santa Ynez and Santa Maria valleys of Santa Barbara County, California, offered suitable conditions for growing high-quality wine grapes. Thus was launched a revival of the area’s two-centuries-old wine industry that by 1995 made Santa Barbara County an internationally prominent wine region. Salud! traces the evolution of Santa Barbara viticulture in the larger context of California’s history and economy, offering insight into one of the state’s most important industries. California has produced wine since Spanish missionaries first planted grapes to make sacramental wines, but it was not until the late twentieth century that changing consumer tastes and a flourishing national economy created the conditions that led to the state’s wine boom. Historian Victor W. Geraci uses the Santa Barbara wine industry as a case study to analyze the history and evolution of American viticulture from its obscure colonial beginnings to its current international acclaim. As elsewhere in the state, Santa Barbara County vintners faced the multiple challenges of selecting grape varieties appropriate to their unique conditions, protecting their crops from disease and insects, developing local wineries, and of marketing their products in a highly competitive national and international market. Geraci gives careful attention to all the details of this production: agriculture, science, and technology; capitalization and investment; land-use issues; politics; the specter posed by the behemoth Napa and multinational wine corporations; and the social and personal consequences of creating and supporting an industry vulnerable to so many natural and economic crises. His extensive research includes interviews with many industry professionals. California is today one of the world’s major wine producers, and Santa Barbara County contributes significantly to the volume and renowned quality of this wine production. Salud! offers a highly engaging overview of an industry in which the ancient romance of wine too often obscures a complex and diverse modern vintibusiness that for better, and sometimes for worse, has shaped the regions it dominates.

 In the mid-1800s San Bernardino emerged as one of the largest settlements in southern California. It surpassed Pueblo de los Angeles and San Diego in grain and lumber yields and boasted a burgeoning cattle industry and promising wine vineyards. But as a Mormon commune–the farthest outpost in Brigham Young’s Rocky Mountain empire–the colony was threatened, and finally abandoned, in 1857 during the Utah war with the United States.

From the beginning, Young had misgivings about the colony. Particularly perplexing was the mix of atypical Latter-day Saints who gravitated there. Among these were ex-slave holders; inter-racial polygamists; horse-race gamblers; distillery proprietors; former mountain men, prospectors, and mercenaries; disgruntled Polynesian immigrants; and finally Apostle Amasa M. Lyman, the colony’s leader, who became involved in spiritualist seances.

Despite Young’s suspicions, when he issued the call to relocate to Utah, two-thirds of the city’s 3,000 residents dutifully obeyed, leaving behind their cumulative fortunes and a city stripped of its regional economic standing. Recounting this remarkable story, Edward Leo Lyman skillfully interweaves the most intriguing details about the setting and chain of events, emphasizing both the significance and irony of this diverse legacy.

San Francisco Bay Area Sports brings together fifteen essays covering the issues, controversies, and personalities that have emerged as northern Californians recreated and competed over the last 150 years. The area’s diversity, anti-establishment leanings, and unique and beautiful natural surroundings are explored in the context of a dynamic sporting past that includes events broadcast to millions or activities engaged in by just a few.

Professional and college events are covered along with lesser-known entities such as Oakland’s public parks, tennis player and Bay Area native Rosie Casals, environmentalism and hiking in Marin County, and the origins of the Gay Games. Taken as a whole, this book clarifies how sport is connected to identities based on sexuality, gender, race, and ethnicity. Just as crucial, the stories here illuminate how sport and recreation can potentially create transgressive spaces, particularity in a place known for its nonconformity.

San Francisco is known and loved around the world for its iconic man-made structures, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, cable cars, and Transamerica Pyramid. Yet its Civic Center, with the grandest collection of monumental municipal buildings in the United States, is often overlooked, drawing less global and local interest, despite its being an urban planning marvel featuring thirteen government office and cultural buildings.

In The San Francisco Civic Center, James Haas tells the complete story of San Francisco’s Civic Center and how it became one of the most complete developments envisioned by any American city. Originally planned and designed by John Galen Howard in 1912, the San Francisco Civic Center is considered in both design and materials one of the finest achievements of the American reformist City Beautiful movement, an urban design movement that began more than a century ago.

Haas meticulously unravels the Civic Center’s story of perseverance and dysfunction, providing an understanding and appreciation of this local and national treasure. He discusses why the Civic Center was built, how it became central to the urban planning initiatives of San Francisco in the early twentieth century, and how the site held onto its founders’ vision despite heated public debates about its function and achievement. He also delves into the vision for the future and related national trends in city planning and the architectural and art movements that influenced those trends.

Riddled with inspiration and leadership as well as controversy, The San Francisco Civic Center, much like the complex itself, is a stunning manifestation of the confident spirit of one of America’s most dynamic and creative cities.
 

San Francisco is a city of contradictions. It is one of the most socially liberal cities in America, but it also has some of the nation’s worst income inequality. It is a playground for tech millionaires, with an outrageously high cost of living, yet it also supports vibrant alternative and avant-garde scenes. So how did the city get this way?
 
In San Francisco Year Zero, San Francisco native Lincoln Mitchell traces the roots of the current situation back to 1978, when three key events occurred: the assassination of George Moscone and Harvey Milk occurring fewer than two weeks after the massacre of Peoples Temple members in Jonestown, Guyana, the explosion of the city’s punk rock scene, and a breakthrough season for the San Francisco Giants. Through these three strands, Mitchell explores the rifts between the city’s pro-business and progressive-left politicians, the emergence of Dianne Feinstein as a political powerhouse, the increasing prominence of the city’s LGBT community, punk’s reinvigoration of the Bay Area’s radical cultural politics, and the ways that the Giants helped unify one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse cities in the nation.
 
Written from a unique insider’s perspective, San Francisco Year Zero deftly weaves together the personal and the political, putting a human face on the social upheavals that transformed a city.
 

Human habitation in Colorado's San Luis Valley stretches back to distant times. Ancient peoples lived there thousands of years ago, as did the Utes, who claim the valley has been theirs forever. Others, both native peoples and Europeans, knew the valley-Don Juan de Oñate claimed the valley for King Phillip II of Spain in 1598. Consequently, the San Luis Valley has many stories, told in many voices.

In this sparkling new edition of The San Luis Valley: Land of the Six-Armed Cross, Virginia McConnell Simmons lays before the reader the stories and voices of this multicultural land. Ranging from prehistoric peoples and historic Indians to early Spanish settlers, trappers, American explorers, railroads, and Euro-American pioneers, this book is a comprehensive volume covering the geography and social history of Colorado's San Luis Valley.

New to the second edition is additional material on Hispanic culture (in particular a description of their fiber arts) and a lengthy appendix cataloging and describing all of the San Luis Valley's Hispanic place names. In addition, the notes and bibliography have been expanded, and the book contains a new introduction by David Fridtjof Halaas, Chief Historian of the Colorado Historical Society. Acclaimed as the standard history for the south-central region of Colorado, The San Luis Valley: Land of the Six-Armed Cross is a book for students, scholars, and others interested in the history of this fascinating and culturally rich corner of the state.

Sand in a Whirlwind is a dramatic account of the events surrounding hostilities between settlers and Pyramid Paiutes in the spring of 1860. Thirty years after its publication Ferol Egan’s now classic tale continues to enlighten and engage readers.

This study fills in some missing links in the Michigan-Ontario Paleo-Indian record. Jackson focuses on the Gainey phase.

The Spanish, Mexicans, and Americans, successively, mined copper for more than 200 years in Santa Rita, New Mexico. Starting in 1799 after an Apache man led the Spanish to the native copper deposits, miners at the site followed industry developments in the nineteenth century to create a network of underground mines. In the early twentieth century these works became part of the Chino Copper Company's open-pit mining operations-operations that would overtake Santa Rita by 1970. In Santa Rita del Cobre, Huggard and Humble detail these developments with in-depth explanations of mining technology, and describe the effects on and consequences for the workers, the community, and the natural environment. Originally known as El Cobre, the mining-military camp of Santa Rita del Cobre ultimately became the company town of Santa Rita, which after World War II evolved into an independent community. From the town's beginnings to its demise, its mixed-heritage inhabitants from Mexico and United States cultivated rich family, educational, religious, social, and labor traditions. Extensive archival photographs, many taken by officials of the Kennecott Copper Corporation, accompany the text, providing an important visual and historical record of a town swallowed up by the industry that created it.

Satan’s Playground chronicles the rise and fall of the tumultuous and lucrative gambling industry that developed just south of the U.S.-Mexico border in the early twentieth century. As prohibitions against liquor, horse racing, gambling, and prostitution swept the United States, the vice industry flourished in and around Tijuana, to the extent that reformers came to call the town “Satan’s Playground,” unintentionally increasing its licentious allure. The area was dominated by Agua Caliente, a large, elegant gaming resort opened by four entrepreneurial Border Barons (three Americans and one Mexican) in 1928. Diplomats, royalty, film stars, sports celebrities, politicians, patricians, and nouveau-riche capitalists flocked to Agua Caliente’s luxurious complex of casinos, hotels, cabarets, and sports extravaganzas, and to its world-renowned thoroughbred racetrack. Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Louis B. Mayer, the Marx Brothers, Bing Crosby, Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, and the boxer Jack Dempsey were among the regular visitors. So were mobsters such as Bugsy Siegel, who later cited Agua Caliente as his inspiration for building the first such resort on what became the Las Vegas Strip.

Less than a year after Agua Caliente opened, gangsters held up its money-car in transit to a bank in San Diego, killing the courier and a guard and stealing the company money pouch. Paul J. Vanderwood weaves the story of this heist gone wrong, the search for the killers, and their sensational trial into the overall history of the often-chaotic development of Agua Caliente, Tijuana, and Southern California. Drawing on newspaper accounts, police files, court records, personal memoirs, oral histories, and “true detective” magazines, he presents a fascinating portrait of vice and society in the Jazz Age, and he makes a significant contribution to the history of the U.S.-Mexico border.

2020 Winner of the Southwest Book Awards
2020 Spur Awards Finalist Contemporary Nonfiction, Western Writers of America 

The Grand Canyon has been saved from dams three times in the last century. Unthinkable as it may seem today, many people promoted damming the Colorado River in the canyon during the early twentieth century as the most feasible solution to the water and power needs of the Pacific Southwest. These efforts reached their climax during the 1960s when the federal government tried to build two massive hydroelectric dams in the Grand Canyon. Although not located within the Grand Canyon National Park or Monument, they would have flooded lengthy, unprotected reaches of the canyon and along thirteen miles of the park boundary.

Saving Grand Canyon tells the remarkable true story of the attempts to build dams in one of America’s most spectacular natural wonders. Based on twenty-five years of research, this fascinating ride through history chronicles a hundred years of Colorado River water development, demonstrates how the National Environmental Policy Act came to be, and challenges the myth that the Sierra Club saved the Grand Canyon. It also shows how the Sierra Club parlayed public perception as the canyon’s savior into the leadership of the modern environmental movement after the National Environmental Policy Act became law.

The tale of the Sierra Club stopping the dams has become so entrenched—and so embellished—that many historians, popular writers, and filmmakers have ignored the documented historical record. This epic story puts the events from 1963–1968 into the broader context of Colorado River water development and debunks fifty years of Colorado River and Grand Canyon myths.

The history of Lake Tahoe begins with the Washoe Indians who resided on its shores for thousands of years, with minimal impact on the landscape. The relatively brief American history at Lake Tahoe began in the mid-nineteenth century. Though awestruck by its beauty, the new arrivals were also intent on harvesting its abundant resources. In a mere half century, the basin’s forests and fisheries were destroyed, the lake’s pristine clarity dramatically reduced.

Left alone, nature healed itself, and by the 1960s mature forests once again surrounded the lake and its water clarity improved, with visibility more than one hundred feet deep. However, Tahoe’s wonders brought a new kind of threat: millions of annual visitors and incessant development, including ski resorts and casinos. Saving Lake Tahoe looks at the interaction through the years between human activities and Tahoe’s natural ecosystems. It is a dramatic story of ecological disasters and near misses, political successes and failures. Utilizing primary sources and interviews with key figures, Makley provides a meticulously researched account of the battles surrounding the management of the Tahoe basin.

Makley takes the story up to the present, describing the formation and evolution of a new type of governing body, the bistate Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, and groundbreaking efforts to utilize science in establishing policy. He depicts the passionate fights between those who seek to preserve the environment and advocates of individual property rights. Although Tahoe remains unique in its splendor, readers will understand why, with continued pressure for development, reversing environmental deterioration and improving the lake water’s clarity remain elusive goals.

Combining the experiences of ordinary people with urban politics and history, Saving San Francisco challenges the long-lived myth that the 1906 disaster erased social differences as it leveled the city. Highlighting new evidence from San Francisco’s relief camps, Andrea Rees Davies shows that as policy makers directed various forms of aid to groups and projects that enjoyed high social status before the disaster, the widespread need and dislocation created opportunities for some groups to challenge biased relief policy. Poor and working-class refugees organized successful protests, while Chinatown business leaders and middle-class white women mobilized resources for the less privileged. Ultimately, however, the political and financial elite shaped relief and reconstruction efforts and cemented social differences in San Francisco.

In 1968 the residents of Lovell, Wyoming began the work of saving the Pryor Mountain Mustang, a breed of horse with a genetic link dating back to the sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadores’ horses. In this moving case study, Christine Reed shows how, through a grassroots campaign, these residents championed the creation of the first federal public wild horse range. Crucial to this provocative analysis of local-federal cooperation is the relationship that grew between the Lovell advocates, the Bureau of Land Management, and the National Park Service. Long before there were federal laws passed to protect wild horse herds across the western states, the Pryor Mountain Mustang was preserved through the cooperative efforts of local residents and federal officials.

Saving the Pryor Mountain Mustang explores the unique and ongoing relationship between locals and the federal government, highlighting the Lovell citizens’ philosophy of cooperation instead of the typical mistrust that exists between wild horse advocates and federal agencies. The book provides a rich analysis of how a determined group of people saved an endangered wild horse herd. The book will have wide appeal to wild horse activists, scholars of local and federal governance, and western history enthusiasts.

Scandinavian immigrants encountered a strange paradox in 1890s Chicago. Though undoubtedly foreign, these newcomers were seen as Nordics--the "race" proclaimed by the scientific racism of the era as the very embodiment of white superiority. As such, Scandinavians from the beginning enjoyed racial privilege and the success it brought without the prejudice, nativism, and stereotyping endured by other immigrant groups. Erika K. Jackson examines how native-born Chicagoans used ideological and gendered concepts of Nordic whiteness and Scandinavian ethnicity to construct social hegemony. Placing the Scandinavian-American experience within the context of historical whiteness, Jackson delves into the processes that created the Nordic ideal. She also details how the city's Scandinavian immigrants repeated and mirrored the racial and ethnic perceptions disseminated by American media. An insightful look at the immigrant experience in reverse, Scandinavians in Chicago bridges a gap in our understanding of how whites constructed racial identity in America.

The Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, are commonly grouped together by their close historic, linguistic, and cultural ties. Their age-old bonds continued to flourish both during and after the period of mass immigration to the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Scandinavians felt comfortable with each other, a feeling forged through centuries of familiarity, and they usually chose to live in close proximity in communities throughout the Upper Midwest of the United States.
     Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century and continuing until the 1920s, hundreds of thousands left Scandinavia to begin life in the United States and Canada. Sweden had the greatest number of its citizens leave for the United States, with more than one million migrating between 1820 and 1920. Per capita, Norway was the country most affected by the exodus; more than 850,000 Norwegians sailed to America between 1820 and 1920. In fact, Norway ranks second only to Ireland in the percentage of its population leaving for the New World during the great European migration. Denmark was affected at a much lower rate, but it too lost more than 300,000 of its population to the promise of America. Once gone, the move was usually permanent; few returned to live in Scandinavia. Michigan was never the most popular destination for Scandinavian immigrants. As immigrants began arriving in the North American interior, they settled in areas to the west of Michigan, particularly in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, and North and South Dakota. Nevertheless, thousands pursued their American dream in the Great Lakes State. They settled in Detroit and played an important role in the city’s industrial boom and automotive industry. They settled in the Upper Peninsula and worked in the iron and copper mines. They settled in the northern Lower Peninsula and worked in the logging industry. Finally, they settled in the fertile areas of west Michigan and contributed to the state’s burgeoning agricultural sector. Today, a strong Scandinavian presence remains in town names like Amble, in Montcalm County, and Skandia, in Marquette County, and in local culinary delicacies like æbleskiver, in Greenville, and lutefisk, found in select grocery stores throughout the state at Christmastime.

Visit the project's website at http://scarletandblack.rutgers.edu

 

The 250th anniversary of the founding of Rutgers University is a perfect moment for the Rutgers community to reconcile its past, and acknowledge its role in the enslavement and debasement of African Americans and the disfranchisement and elimination of Native American people and culture. Scarlet and Black, Volume Three, concludes this groundbreaking documentation of the history of Rutgers’s connection to slavery, which was neither casual nor accidental—nor unusual. Like most early American colleges, Rutgers depended on slaves to build its campuses and serve its students and faculty; it depended on the sale of black people to fund its very existence. This final of three volumes concludes the work of the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Population in Rutgers History. This latest volume includes essays about Black and Puerto Rican students' experiences; the development of the Black Unity League; the Conklin Hall takeover; the divestment movement against South African apartheid; anti-racism struggles during the 1990s; and the Don Imus controversy and the 2007 Scarlet Knights women's basketball team. To learn more about the work of the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Population in Rutgers History, visit the project's website at http://scarletandblack.rutgers.edu.

The 250th anniversary of the founding of Rutgers University is a perfect moment for the Rutgers community to reconcile its past, and acknowledge its role in the enslavement and debasement of African Americans and the disfranchisement and elimination of Native American people and culture. Scarlet and Black, Volume 2, continues to document the history of Rutgers’s connection to slavery, which was neither casual nor accidental—nor unusual. Like most early American colleges, Rutgers depended on slaves to build its campuses and serve its students and faculty; it depended on the sale of black people to fund its very existence. This second of a planned three volumes continues the work of the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Population in Rutgers History. This latest volume includes: an introduction to the period studied (from the end of the Civil War through WWII) by Deborah Gray White; a study of the first black students at Rutgers and New Brunswick Theological Seminary; an analysis of African-American life in the City of New Brunswick during the period; and profiles of the earliest black women to matriculate at Douglass College.

To learn more about the work of the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Population in Rutgers History, visit the project's website at http://scarletandblack.rutgers.edu

In this volume, editor James E. Fitting compiles research and analysis on the Schultz site, a key archaeological site in the Saginaw Valley of eastern Michigan. Ten contributors, including Fitting, write on the features and artifacts found during years of excavation at this important site. Fitting also includes a review of the general patterns of cultural development in the Saginaw Valley.

Hubertis M. Cummings vividly relates the tale of the sturdy and indomitable Scotch-Irish settlers in Pennsylvania. Hardened from their ancient battles against tyranny and injustice in their native “bonnie Scotland,” they struggled to establish a new home in America along and beyond the Susquehanna River. Their passionate love of freedom and will to survive helped them make a life for themselves in a hostile frontier. Their deep faith and spirit would thrive in this region, as they helped to forge the identity and destiny a young nation.

Scots began settling in North America in the earliest colonial days. They were heavily involved in the Great Lakes region’s major industries, as these evolved from fur trade to farming and lumbering to industry. From early settlement to the industrial revolution, Scots brought to the state a pioneer spirit and an extraordinary level of education. Though rendered almost invisible both by clustering under the umbrella of the British Commonwealth and by the fact that few Scottish traditions are considered whatsoever foreign, ethnic, or exotic, Scottish influences run deep in Michigan history and culture. From ice hockey to industry, much of what represents Michigan has roots that were embedded in Scotland. Although Alan T. Forrester notes that symbolic Scottish ethnicity—Highland Games, Scottish Festivals, and Burns Night Suppers—is practically the only obvious relic of Scottish heritage in Michigan, he illuminates how much more of this legacy is a part of this state.

The Scots Irish were one of early Pennsylvania’s largest non-English immigrant groups. They were stereotyped as frontier ruffians and Indian haters. In The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania, historian Judith Ridner insists that this immigrant group was socio-economically diverse. Servants and free people, individuals and families, and political exiles and refugees from Ulster, they not only pioneered new frontier settlements, but also populated the state’s cities—Philadelphia and Pittsburgh—and its towns, such as Lancaster, Easton, and Carlisle. 

Ridner provides a much-overdue synthesis and reassessment of this immigrant group, tracing a century of Scotch-Irish migration from 1720 to 1820. These men and women brought their version of Ulster to the colonies in their fierce commitments to family, community, entrepreneurship, Presbyterianism, republican politics, and higher education. The settlements they founded across the state, including many farms, businesses, meetinghouses, and colleges, ensured that Pennsylvania would be their cradle in America, and these settlements stand as powerful testaments to their legacy to the state’s history and development.

Public sculpture is a major draw in today’s cities, and nowhere is this more the case than in New York. In the Big Apple, urban art has become synonymous with the municipal “brand,” highlighting the metropolis as vibrant, creative, tolerant, orderly, and above all, safe. Sculpture in Gotham tells the story of how the City of New York came to be committed to public art patronage beginning in the mid-1960s. In that era of political turbulence, cultural activists and city officials for a time shifted away from traditional monuments, joining forces to sponsor ambitious sculptural projects as an instrument for urban revitalization.

Focusing on specific people, agencies and organizations, and both temporary and permanent projects, from the 1960s forward, Michele H. Bogart reveals the changing forms and meanings of municipal public art. Sculpture in Gotham illustrates how such shifts came about at a time when art theories and styles were morphing markedly, and when municipalities were reeling from racial unrest, economic decline, and countercultural challenges—to culture as well as the state. While sculptural installations on New York City property took time and were not without controversy, Gotham’s processes and policies produced notable results, providing precedents and lessons for cities the world over.

By age thirty-four Captain John Smith was already a well-known adventurer and explorer. He had fought as a mercenary in the religious wars of Europe and had won renown for fighting the Turks. He was most famous as the leader of the Virginia Colony at Jamestown, where he had wrangled with the powerful Powhatan and secured the help of Pocahontas. By 1614 he was seeking new adventures. He found them on the 7,000 miles of jagged coastline of what was variously called Norumbega, North Virginia, or Cannada, but which Smith named New England. This land had been previously explored by the English, but while they had made observations and maps and interacted with the native inhabitants, Smith found that “the Coast is . . . even as a Coast unknowne and undiscovered.” The maps of the region, such as they were, were inaccurate. On a long, painstaking excursion along the coast in a shallop, accompanied by sailors and the Indian guide Squanto, Smith took careful compass readings and made ocean soundings. His Description of New England, published in 1616, which included a detailed map, became the standard for many years, the one used by such subsequent voyagers as the Pilgrims when they came to Plymouth in 1620. The Sea Mark is the first narrative history of Smith’s voyage of exploration, and it recounts Smith’s last years when, desperate to return to New England to start a commercial fishery, he languished in Britain, unable to persuade his backers to exploit the bounty he had seen there.

At the age of 27, Fannie Sedlacek left her Bohemian homestead in Nebraska to join the gold rush to the Klondike. From the Klondike to the Tanana, Fannie continued north, finally settling in Katishna near Mount McKinley. This woman, later known as Fannie Quigley, became a prospector who staked her own claims and a cook who ran a roadhouse. She hunted and trapped and thrived for nearly forty years in an environment that others found unbearable.

Her wilderness lifestyle inspired many of those who met her to record their impressions of this self-sufficient woman, who died in 1944. To many of the 700,000 annual visitors to Denali National Park she is a symbol of the enduring spirit of the original pioneers.

Searching for Fannie Quigley: A Wilderness Life in the Shadow of Mount McKinley goes beyond the mere biographical facts of this unique woman’s journey. It also tells historian Jane G. Haigh’s own story of tracking and tracing the many paths that Fannie Quigley’s intriguing life took. Uncovering remote clues, digging through archives, and listening to oral accounts from a wide array of sources, Haigh has fashioned this rich lode into a compelling narrative.

In Searching for Fannie Quigley, Haigh separates fact from fiction to reveal the true story of this highly mythologized pioneer woman.

Deep in the desolate Mojave Desert in Nevada’s extreme southern tip lies a small mining town called Searchlight. This meticulously researched book by Searchlight’s most distinguished native son recounts the colorful history of the town and the lives of the hardy people who built it and sustained a community in one of the least hospitable environments in the United States. Its story encompasses both Nevada’s early twentieth-century mining boom and the phenomenal growth of southern Nevada after World War II. Searchlight is a valuable contribution to the history of Nevada and a lively account of life in the forbidding depths of the Mojave Desert.<br> <br>

Fire is a fearsome constant in the America West. As the author David J. Strohmaier notes, "Whether we have tended a campfire along Oregon's Deschutes River in March, engaged the advancing front of a Great Basin wildfire in the torrid heat of August, or watched fire settle into the subdued, smoldering leaf piles of October, all of our lives, to one degree or another, are bracketed by fire." In The Seasons of Fire, Strohmaier effectively blends nature writing, personal essay, and philosophical analysis as he deliberately crosses disciplinary boundaries. He discusses the "moral" dimensions of fire—not only whether fires are good, bad, or indifferent phenomena, but also how fire, more generally understood, shapes meaning for human life. The consequences of discussing the moral side of fire speak directly to the contours of the human soul, and to our sense of our place on the land. Strohmaier, a long-term firefighter himself, includes accurate and sometimes gut-wrenching descriptions of the firefighter's experience.

In The Second Great Emancipation, Donald Holley uses statistical and narrative analysis to demonstrate that farm mechanization occurred in the Delta region of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi after the region’s population of farm laborers moved away for new opportunities. Rather than pushing labor off the land, Holley argues, the mechanical cotton picker enabled the continuation of cotton cultivation in the post-plantation era, opening the door for the civil rights movement, while ushering a period of prosperity into the South.

The one-room schoolhouse may be a thing of the past, but it is the foundation on which modern education rests. Sue Thomas now traces the progress of early education in Missouri, demonstrating how important early schools were in taming the frontier.

A Second Home offers an in-depth and entertaining look at education in the days when pioneers had to postpone schooling for their children until they could provide shelter for their families and clear their fields for crops, while well-to-do families employed tutors or sent their children back east. Thomas tells of the earliest known English school at the Ramsay settlement near Cape Girardeau, then of the opening of a handful of schools around the time of the Louisiana Purchase—such as Benjamin Johnson’s school on Sandy Creek, Christopher Schewe’s school for boys when St. Louis was still a village, and the Ste. Genevieve Academy, where poor and Indian children were taught free of charge. She describes how, as communities grew, additional private schools opened—including “dame schools,” denominational schools, and subscription schools—until public education came into its own in the 1850s.

Drawing on oral histories collected throughout the state, as well as private diaries and archival research, the book is full of firsthand accounts of what education once was like—including descriptions of the furnishings, teaching methods, and school-day activities in one-room log schools. It also includes the experiences of former slaves and free blacks following the Civil War when they were newly entitled to public education, with discussions of the contributions of John Berry Meachum, James Milton Turner, and other African American leaders.

With its remembrances of simpler times, A Second Home tells of community gatherings in country schools and events such as taffy pulls and spelling bees, and offers tales of stern teachers, student pranks, and schoolyard games. Accompanying illustrations illuminate family and school life in the colonial, territorial, early statehood, and post-Civil War periods. For readers who recall older family members’ accounts or who are simply fascinated by the past, this is a book that will conjure images of a bygone time while opening a new window on Missouri history.

The author of The Desert, the book that made the American landscape accessible to the mainstream mind, was much less like his fellow environmental prophets John Muir and Henry David Thoreau than he would have had us believe. Van Dyke claimed to have wandered "alone on horseback for thousands of miles through the American Southwest and northern Mexico," as readers of The Desert—now in the millions since the book was published in 1901—were told. He did not. In The Secret Life of John C. Van Dyke, Teague and Wild unmask the desert saint with Van Dyke’s own recently discovered letters. These letters depict a privileged, patrician, and pampered member of the upper-class. His incriminating correspondence reveals that he saw most of the desert from plush railroad cars and grand hotel rooms. In the introduction, the editors clear up many misconceptions scholars currently hold about Van Dyke’s ecological principles, about his outdoorsmanship, and about his trip through the desert itself. As the centennial of the publication of The Desert approaches, this lively collection of letters helps set the record straight. The John C. Van Dyke unveiled in The Secret Life is a more varied character than we had supposed—still worthy of much admiration for his remarkable accomplishments, but still mysterious, and not the man we thought him to be.

In this fascinating biography set in nineteenth-century Savannah, Georgia, Janice L. Sumler-Edmond resurrects the life and times of Aspasia Cruvellier Mirault, a free woman of color whose story was until now lost to historical memory. It’s a story that informs our understanding of the antebellum South as we watch this widowed matriarch navigate the social, economic, and political complexities to create a legacy for her family.

This 1910 study of sectionalism in Virginia illustrates how the east and west of Virginia were destined to separate into two states. Barbara Rasmussen, professor of Public History and Director of Cultural Resource Management at West Virginia University writes a new introduction to Sectionalism in Virginia, setting Ambler’s classic grand achievement into the context of its production by creating an historical process for studying West Virginia history.

In Securing Paradise, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez shows how tourism and militarism have functioned together in Hawai`i and the Philippines, jointly empowering the United States to assert its geostrategic and economic interests in the Pacific. She does so by interpreting fiction, closely examining colonial and military construction projects, and delving into present-day tourist practices, spaces, and narratives. For instance, in both Hawai`i and the Philippines, U.S. military modes of mobility, control, and surveillance enable scenic tourist byways. Past and present U.S. military posts, such as the Clark and Subic Bases and the Pearl Harbor complex, have been reincarnated as destinations for tourists interested in World War II. The history of the U.S. military is foundational to tourist itineraries and imaginations in such sites. At the same time, U.S. military dominance is reinforced by the logics and practices of mobility and consumption underlying modern tourism. Working in tandem, militarism and tourism produce gendered structures of feeling and formations of knowledge. These become routinized into everyday life in Hawai`i and the Philippines, inculcating U.S. imperialism in the Pacific.

During World War I, fear that a network of German spies was operating on American soil justified the rapid growth of federal intelligence agencies. When that threat proved illusory, these agencies, staffed heavily by corporate managers and anti-union private detectives, targeted antiwar and radical labor groups, particularly the Socialist party and the Industrial Workers of the World.

Seeing Reds, based largely on case files from the Bureau of Investigation, Military Intelligence Division, and Office of Naval Intelligence, describes this formative period of federal domestic spying in the Pittsburgh region.  McCormick traces the activities of  L. M. Wendell, a Bureau of Investigation “special employee” who infiltrated the IWW’s Pittsburgh recruiting branch and the inner circle of anarchist agitator and lawyer Jacob Margolis.  Wendell and other Pittsbugh based agents spied on radical organizations from Erie, Pennsylvania, to Camp Lee, Virginia, intervened in the steel and coal strikes of 1919, and carried out the Palmer raids aimed at mass deportation of members of the Union of Russian Workers and the New Communist Party.

McCormick’s detailed history uses extensive research to add to our understanding of the security state, cold war ideology, labor and immigration history, and the rise of the authoritarian American Left, as well as the career paths of figures as diverse as J. Edgar Hoover and William Z. Foster.

Gulf American Corporation’s heavy influence on the migration of people to Florida
 
The Gulf American Corporation played a significant role in the development and urbanization of the state of Florida, especially southwest Florida, during the late 1950s and 1960s. The Miami-based company promoted living in Florida to people residing throughout North America and in several foreign countries. It also enabled people of average incomes to purchase home sites in Florida on an installment basis. As a result, Gulf American had a heavy influence on the migration of people to Florida as early as 1957.
 
Leonard and Julius J. Rosen of Baltimore, Maryland, founded and controlled the corporation during its 12-year existence from 1957 to 1969. The sale and promotion of Florida real estate was an extension of their marketing style developed in previous years when they sold mail-order cosmetics and other products. Their innovative sales strategies ultimately resulted in conflicts with state and federal regulatory agencies in the mid 1960s over the firm’s aggressive sales methods. The struggle with the state of Florida over regulation, which degenerated into a personal conflict between Governor Claude Kirk and the Rosens, resulted in the Rosens’ selling the business to GAC Corporation of Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1969. After a series of business setbacks and continuing accusations of misrepresentations by salespeople, GAC declared bankruptcy in 1975 and was eventually resurrected as Avatar Holding, Inc., in 1980.
    Gulf American left a mixed legacy to the state of Florida by building several growing cities like Cape Coral and Golden Gate, while at the same time selling worthless underwater swampland near the Everglades. The building of their first development was planned by the company. In that sense, Cape Coral was designed to be the Rosens’ most elaborate sales tool.
 
Based on 31 personal interviews with former Gulf American Corporation, GAC/Avatar Holding company officials and supplemented by articles from 25 different newspapers, this book provides a comprehensive and fascinating look at the Gulf American Corporation—the largest land sales firm in the United States in the 1960s. In many ways the story of Gulf American is a rags-to-riches tale of Leonard and Julius (Jack) Rosen, complete with intrigue and the fluctuations of fortune that matched the rising tides that covered much of the land they sold.
 
 

Howard Cannon (1912 - 2002) represented Nevada in the U.S. Senate from 1958 until 1982 and acquired a reputation as one of its most productive and influential members. Because he was a modest man more comfortable with hard work than self-aggrandizement, he was also one of its most under-appreciated. Nonetheless, Cannon influenced many major changes in American politics and policies during his time in office.

Born to a devout Mormon family in a small farming community in southwest Utah, Cannon served in the Army Air Force during World War II and emerged from the war as a hero. Soon he was part of the postwar migration of ambitious, adventurous Americans to the booming desert city of Las Vegas, where he practiced law and entered local politics. In 1958 he was elected to the U.S. Senate and joined a group of influential young Democratic senators who were to play a major role in shaping the country’s future. His service on the Aeronautical and Space Sciences Committee and the Armed Services Committee led to major changes in the air travel industry, including deregulation, and to increased support for national military preparedness.

Separate Paths: Lenapes and Colonists in West New Jersey is the first cross-cultural study of European colonization in the region south of the Falls of the Delaware River (now Trenton). Lenape men and women welcomed their allies, the Swedes and Finns, to escape more rigid English regimes on the west bank of the Delaware, offering land to establish farms, share resources, and trade. In the 1670s, Quaker men and women challenged this model with strategies to acquire all Lenape territory for their own use and to sell as real estate to new immigrants. Though the Lenapes remained sovereign and “old settlers” retained their Swedish Lutheran religion and ethnic autonomy, the West Jersey proprietors had considerable success in excluding Lenapes from their land. The Friends believed God favored their endeavor with epidemics of smallpox and other European diseases that destroyed Lenape families and communities. Affluent Quakers also introduced enslavement of imported Africans and Natives—and the violence that sustained it—to a colony they had promoted with the liberal West New Jersey Concessions of 1676-77. Thus, they defied their prior experience of religious persecution and their principles of peaceful resolution of conflict, equality of everyone before God, and the golden rule to treat others as you wish to be treated. Despite mutual commitment to peace by Lenapes, old settlers, and Friends, Quaker colonization had similar results to military conquests of Natives by English in Virginia and New England, and Dutch in the Hudson Valley and northern New Jersey. Still, in alliance with old settlers, Lenape communities survived in areas outside the focus of English colonization, in the Pine Barrens, upper reaches of streams, and Atlantic shore.

Fighting, nationalism, and religion influenced Serbian migration to America in three distinct waves during the twentieth century, first following the Balkan Wars, again after the Second World War, and most recently, following the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1980s. Serbians in Michigan examines the lives of Serbian immigrants from lowland areas of the Balkans and the distinct highland culture of Montenegro. The work provides cultural background to Serbian society that serves as a benchmark to compare the changes that occurred among the population after arriving in Michigan. The book also functions as an informational how-to guide for individuals of Serbian descent who are interested in learning more about their ancestors. Lubotina provides key words, phrases, and recipes that allow readers to sample aspects of Serbian culture from the comfort of their homes. Additionally, the book explores the nature of a split between conservative and liberal factions in Serbian-American communities. However, a key theme in the book is how the Serbian Orthodox Church has maintained Serbian heritage and nationalism through several generations in America.

A hundred miles northwest of Los Angeles, Sespe Creek flows through some of the wildest territory in California. A mostly roadless expanse of chaparral and mixed forest, in many places nearly inaccessible even on foot, the Sespe is the untamed heart of Southern California, a wilderness on the edge of one of the world’s major metropolitan developments. To nature writer and outdoorsman John Bradley Monsma, the Sespe is both his place of escape and the place “that teaches me to be fully alive.” In The Sespe Wild, Monsma shares his exploration of this unique and fantastic region. His attention ranges from the physical Sespe, examined on foot or by kayak, to the subsurface geology that shaped it, the Chumash people who first occupied it, and the impact of Spanish and then American settlers. He also considers the Sespe through the eyes of some of its nonhuman populations—the nearly extinct condors, the vanished grizzlies, the mountain sheep, the steelhead trout, the red-legged frogs. Through the metaphor of the river, he ponders the tensions between preservation and overmanagement of wildlife and wilderness areas, the ecology of fire, the intricate connections between species, and the almost miraculous ways that the Sespe has escaped the fate of other Southern California streams, dammed or carved up into canals by development. “To consider this place,” Monsma says, “is to call up issues crucial wherever wilderness and cities meet: recreational impacts on wildlife habitat, the dynamics of accessibility and protection, the physical and psychological need for healthy ecosystems, threats of development and resource extraction.” Monsma’s engaging text addresses the Sespe’s losses and its ongoing pattern of creation and renewal, leading us through rich layers of natural and cultural history in a narrative as colorful and exciting as a day on a Sespe trail. The Sespe, existing at the intersection of ecological processes and human ideals of wilderness, reminds us that nature and culture have always intermingled, and that the past and present, animal and human, “natural” and “unnatural” are ultimately and irrevocably inseparable.

In 1916, Philadelphia department-store magnate John Wanamaker launched plans for a Sesqui-Centennial International Exposition in 1926. It would be a magnificent world's fair to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The “Sesqui” would also transform sooty, industrial Philadelphia into a beautiful Beaux Arts city.

However, when the Sesqui opened on May 31, 1926, in the remote, muddy swamps of South Philadelphia, the fair was unfinished, with a few shabbily built and mostly empty structures. Crowds stayed away in droves: fewer than five million paying customers attended, costing the city millions of dollars. Philadelphia became a national scandal—a city so corrupt that one political boss could kidnap an entire world’s fair. 

In his fascinating history Sesqui!, noted historian Thomas Keels situates this ill-fated celebration—a personal boondoggle by the all-powerful Congressman William S. Vare—against the transformations taking place in America during the 1920s. Keels provides a comprehensive account of the Sesqui as a meeting ground for cultural changes sweeping the country: women’s and African-American rights, anti-Semitism, eugenics, Prohibition, and technological advances.

Founded in 1856 by Bishop James Roosevelt Bayley of Newark, Seton Hall University has played a large part in New Jersey and American Catholic life for nearly two centuries. From its modest beginnings as a small college and seminary to its present position as a major national university, it has always sought to provide “a home for the mind, the heart, and the spirit.”
 
In this vivid and elegantly written history, Dermot Quinn examines how Seton Hall was able to develop as an institution while keeping faith with its founder’s vision. Looking at the men and women who made Seton Hall what it is today, he paints a compelling picture of a university that has enjoyed its share of triumphs but has also suffered tragedy and loss. He shows how it was established in an age of prejudice and transformed in the aftermath of war, while exploring how it negotiated between a distinctly Roman Catholic identity and a mission to include Americans of all faiths. 
 
Seton Hall University not only recounts the history of a great educational institution, it also shares the personal stories of the people who shaped it and were shaped by it: the presidents, the priests, the faculty, the staff, and of course, the students.

As children, Shirley Ann Higuchi and her brothers knew Heart Mountain only as the place their parents met, imagining it as a great Stardust Ballroom in rural Wyoming. As they grew older, they would come to recognize the name as a source of great sadness and shame for their older family members, part of the generation of Japanese Americans forced into the hastily built concentration camp in the aftermath of Executive Order 9066.
Only after a serious cancer diagnosis did Shirley's mother, Setsuko, share her vision for a museum at the site of the former camp, where she had been donating funds and volunteering in secret for many years. After Setsuko's death, Shirley skeptically accepted an invitation to visit the site, a journey that would forever change her life and introduce her to a part of her mother she never knew.
Navigating the complicated terrain of the Japanese American experience, Shirley patched together Setsuko's story and came to understand the forces and generational trauma that shaped her own life. Moving seamlessly between family and communal history, Setsuko's Secret offers a clear window into the "camp life" that was rarely revealed to the children of the incarcerated. This volume powerfully insists that we reckon with the pain in our collective American past.

Revealing the enduring link between settler colonization and the making of modern Minneapolis

 

Colonial relations are often excluded from discussions of urban politics and are viewed instead as part of a regrettable past. In Settler Colonial City, David Hugill confronts this culture of organized forgetting by arguing that Minnesota’s largest city is enduringly bound up with the power dynamics of settler-colonial politics. Examining several distinct Minneapolis sites, Settler Colonial City tracks how settler-colonial relations were articulated alongside substantial growth in the Twin Cities Indigenous community during the second half of the twentieth century—creating new geographies of racialized advantage. 

Studying the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis in the decades that followed the Second World War, Settler Colonial City demonstrates how colonial practices and mentalities shaped processes of urban reorganization, animated non-Indigenous “advocacy research,” informed a culture of racialized policing, and intertwined with a broader culture of American imperialism. It reveals how the actions, assumptions, and practices of non-Indigenous people in Minneapolis produced and enforced a racialized economy of power that directly contradicts the city’s “progressive” reputation. 

Ultimately, Settler Colonial City argues that the hierarchical and racist political dynamics that characterized the city’s prosperous beginnings are not exclusive to a bygone era but rather are central to a recalibrated settler-colonial politics that continues to shape contemporary cities across the United States.  

"This is a book with great meaning for those of us who grew up on farms, and a book to be shared with young people eager to know more about pioneer life." --Jerry Apps, author of "Old Farm: A History" and "Whispers and Shadows: A Naturalist's Memoir"

"A Settler's Year" provides a rare glimpse into the lives of early immigrants to the upper Midwest. Evocative photographs taken at Old World Wisconsin, the country's largest outdoor museum of rural life, lushly illustrate stories woven by historian, novelist, and poet Kathleen Ernst and compelling firsthand accounts left by the settlers themselves.

In this beautiful book, readers will discover the challenges and triumphs found in the seasonal rhythms of rural life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As they turn the pages--traveling from sprawling farm to tidy crossroads village, and from cramped and smoky cabins to gracious, well-furnished homes--they'll experience the back-straining chores, cherished folk traditions, annual celebrations, and indomitable spirit that comprised pioneer life.

At its heart "A Settler's Year" is about people dreaming of, searching for, and creating new homes in a new land. This moving book transports us back to the pioneer era and inspires us to explore the stories found on our own family trees.