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There's much more to southern New Jersey than the Pine Barrens and the Jersey Devil, and this collection by journalists Jim Waltzer and Tom Wilk tells readers all about it. Oceanside and bayside towns offer a box seat from which to observe the regions rich history and the summery lore of the wonders of nature. Landlocked towns boast their own homespun and hell-raising traditions and idiosyncrasies.

Waltzer and Wilk have compiled almost fifty stories about the state's southernmost counties. Although the focus is on Atlantic City and its remarkable people, outsize structures, and quirky events, the storytelling ranges across the wider region to provide an insiders look at history as it was being made. You'll encounter gangsters and gamblers, baseball hitters and hurricanes, famous piers and hotels, landmark theaters and eateries, splashy events and unheralded oddities ¾ in sum, a cross-section of the regions character and characters.

The authors divide their book into six sections: entertainment, famous and infamous events, innovations and innovators, leisure and recreation, room and board, and sports legends. Within each section are the rich and varied stories Waltzer and Wilk have collected for New Jerseyans reading pleasure.

Drawing on more than thirty years of meticulous research, Kay Rippelmeyer details the Depression-era history of the simultaneous creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois. Through the stories of the men who worked in CCC camps devoted to soil and forest conservation projects, she offers a fascinating look into an era of utmost significance to the identity, citizens, wildlife, and natural landscape of the region.

Rippelmeyer outlines the geologic and geographic history of southern Illinois, from Native American uses of the land to the timber industry’s decimation of the forest by the 1920s. Detailing both the economic hardships and agricultural land abuse plaguing the region during the Depression, she reveals how the creation of the CCC under Franklin Delano Roosevelt coincided with the regional campaign for a national forest and how locals first became aware of and involved with the program.

Rippelmeyer mined CCC camp records from the National Archives, newspaper accounts and other correspondence and conducted dozens of oral interviews with workers and their families to re-create life in the camps. An extensive camp compendium augments the volume, featuring numerous photographs, camp locations and dates of operation, work history, and company rosters. Satisfying public curiosity and the need for factual information about the camps in southern Illinois, this is an essential contribution to regional history and a window to the national impact of the CCC.

Take an unforgettable road trip down one of America’s most fascinating highways, U.S.

On what highway can you find the headquarters of the FBI, Dow Jones Interactive, and the National Enquirer? What road is home to the Bronx Zoo, the Okefenokee Swamp, and Flipper? On the side of what freeway can you find the Super Duper Weenie Wagon, Larry’s Redneck Bar, and the Big Chicken Barn? Peter Genovese found them all, along with about a million other fascinating and bizarre attractions, on U.S. 1, ‘the best damn highway in America,” as he calls it. Join him for the road trip of a lifetime The Great American Road Trip: A Journey Down U.S. 1.

U.S. 1 may not be America’s scenic highway, but it’s certainly the most colorful. It runs through Boston, New York, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Miami, in addition to Caribou, Maine, Quonochontaug, Rhode Island, and Alma, Georgia. It zig-zags along the wild and beautiful Maine coast and soars over the Atlantic Ocean as the Overseas Highway, one of the most spectacular stretches of road anywhere. The Star-Spangled Banner is on U.S. 1. Madonna lived on U.S. 1 (until she sold her house to Rosie O'Donnell). U.S. 1 is Main Street and the Miracle Mile, two-lane blacktop and six-lane expressway, straight as an arrow in some places and twistier than a Philadelphia soft pretzel in others.

 Genovese spent two years on U.S. 1, talking to everyone from doughnut makers, dolphin trainers, and swamp guides to real Miami vice cops and the keeper of the national parasite collection. His resulting book is the most complete portrait of an American highway ever written. With his unerring eye for detail, sense of humor, and understanding of human nature, Genovese takes readers on a sometimes funny, sometimes sad, always illuminating 2,450-mile journey from Fort Kent, Maine to Key West, Florida.

 Ride along with Genovese and grab a drink at the Last Resort Bar or the Last Chance Saloon, then pick up a paperback at the Banned Bookstore. Visit Oscar, the biggest gator in the Okefenokee Swamp, have dinner at Hog Heaven, and take in a Portland Seadogs baseball game. Tour a Budweiser brewery and go into the pit at a NASCAR race. Looking for someplace to stay? How about the world’s only underwater hotel, the Jules’ Undersea Lodge, or in a cabin made entirely from one pine tree at the Maine Idyll Motor Court? If it’s culture you seek, the highway boasts dozens of museums. While you may have heard of the Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of American Art, how about the Blacks in Wax Museum, Tragedy in the United States Museum, and the Mushroom Museum? There’s something for everyone on U.S. 1, and Genovese has written about it all in The Great American Road Trip.

When Abraham Lincoln moved to Illinois’ Sangamo Country in 1831, he found a pioneer community transforming from a cluster of log houses along an ancient trail to a community of new towns and state roads. But two of the towns vanished in a matter of years, and many of the activities and lifestyles that shaped them were almost entirely forgotten. In The Sangamo Frontier, archaeologist Robert Mazrim unearths the buried history of this early American community, breathing new life into a region that still rests in Lincoln’s shadow. 

Named after a shallow river that cuts through the prairies of central Illinois, the Sangamo Country—an area that now encompasses the capital city of Springfield and present-day Sangamon County—was first colonized after the War of 1812. For the past fifteen years, Mazrim has conducted dozens of excavations there, digging up pieces of pioneer life, from hand-forged iron and locally made crockery to pewter spoons and Staffordshire teacups. And here, in beautifully illustrated stories of each dig, he shows how each of these small artifacts can teach us something about the lifestyles of people who lived on the frontier nearly two hundred years ago. Allowing us to see past the changed modern landscape and the clichés of pioneer history, Mazrim deftly uses his findings to portray the homes, farms, taverns, and pottery shops where Lincoln’s neighbors once lived and worked. 

Drawing readers into the thrill of discovery, The Sangamo Frontier inaugurates a new kind of archaeological history that both enhances and challenges our written history. It imbues today’s landscape with an authentic ghostliness that will reawaken the curiosity of anyone interested in the forgotten people and places that helped shape our nation.

For nineteenth-century travelers, the Santa Fe Trail was an indispensable route stretching from Missouri to New Mexico and beyond, and the section called “The Missouri Trail”—from St. Louis to Westport—offered migrating Americans their first sense of the West with its promise of adventure. The truth was, any easterner who wanted to reach Santa Fe had to first travel the width of Missouri.

This book offers an easy-to-read introduction to Missouri’s chunk of Santa Fe Trail, providing an account of the trail’s historical and cultural significance. Mary Collins Barile tells how the route evolved, stitched together from Indian paths, trappers’ traces, and wagon roads, and how the experience of traveling the Santa Fe Trail varied even within Missouri.

The book highlights the origin and development of the trail, telling how nearly a dozen Missouri towns claimed the trail: originally Franklin, from which the first wagon trains set out in 1821, then others as the trailhead moved west. It also offers a brief description of what travelers could expect to find in frontier Missouri, where cooks could choose from a variety of meats, including hogs fed on forest acorns and game such as deer, squirrels, bear, and possum, and reminds readers of the risks of western travel. Injury or illness could be fatal; getting a doctor might take hours or even days.

The extraordinary diversity of New Jersey is captured in this revised and up-to-date edition of This Is New Jersey, for forty years a classic and one of the most popular books ever written about the state. History, current problems, and opportunities for the future are skillfully blended in a book that makes it clear that there is a lot more to the state than can be imagined by those who speed through it on any of New Jersey's numerous interstates or railways. Ranking forty-sixth in size, but sixth in population, New Jersey is the most urban and densely populated of the fifty states. In spite of that, the state truly deserves its nickname, Garden State, and it has a large recreation industry. John T. Cunningham examines the state county by county from the hill country to the city belt; from the dairy farms to the Jersey shore. Historically, settlement in New Jersey goes back to the Lenni Lenape Indians, to the colonists, and to the state's place as the crossroads of the American Revolution. To those who do not know the state's byways and quiet towns, it appears that highways abound. Yet there are also many thousands of acres of precious woodland preserved by park commissions in Essex and Union counties. In northern New Jersey alone, there are more than a million acres of hardwood forests. In southern New Jersey, over a million acres of the fascinating Pinelands account for almost a quarter of the total state area. New Jersey is a land of lakes and mountains, of fishing docks and two-hundred-year-old houses, of farms and factories, of old universities and new commuting towns. This fourth edition retains the popular pictures of each county courthouse, the heart of county history andadministration. This fully redesigned edition is enhanced by several four-color and over 100 black-and-white illustrations by noted New Jersey photographer Walter Choroszewski.