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...

In Stephen Fry in America, the beloved British comic turns his celebrated wit and insight to unearthing the real U.S. as he travels across the continent.Stephen Fry has always loved America. In fact, he came very close to being born here. His fascination for the country and its people sees him embarking on an epic journey across America, visiting each of its fifty states to discover how such a huge diversity of people, cultures, languages, and beliefs creat...

One woman's struggle to restore an old slave cemetery uncovers centuries-old racismWhen China Galland visited her childhood hometown in east Texas, she learned of an unmarked cemetery for slaves-Love Cemetery. Her ensuing quest to restore and reclaim the cemetary unearths racial wounds that have never completely healed. Research becomes activism as she organizes a grassroots, interracial committee, made up of local religious leaders and lay people, to work on restoring community ac...

A history of independent African American settlements in Texas during the Jim Crow era, featuring historical and contemporary photographs.In the decades following the Civil War, nearly a quarter of African Americans achieved a remarkable victory—they got their own land. While other ex-slaves and many poor whites became trapped in the exploitative sharecropping system, these independence-seeking individuals settled on pockets of unclaimed land that had been deemed to...

Born in 1860s Missouri, nobody expected George Washington Carver to succeed. Slaves were not allowed to be educated. After the Civil War, Carver enrolled in classes and proved to be a star student. He became the first black student at Iowa State Agricultural College and later its first black professor. He went on to the Tuskegee Institute where he specialized in botany (the study of plants) and developed techniques to grow crops better. His work with vegetables, especially peanuts, made hi...

SALEM, WEST VIRGINIA A small town with a big spirit. Every town has its stories, and Salem is no exception. When Salem was still in the state of Virginia, Preston Randolph, a renowned educator and pillar of the community, campaigned for Abraham Lincoln. Within these pages you will learn about the person who manufactured Salem's first electricity; the first man to sell oil that was produced and marketed in Harrison County; where in 1976 a well still existed that had been used to supply wate...

Virginia Ames was born in the Deep South at the dawn of the twentieth century. In her hundredth year, Ames takes us back to the 1970 cross-country sojourn wherein she and daughter Mary poignantly and critically looked at a century of sociability and social change—including race relations, revolutionary politics, the auto, space exploration, and flight. Braided into the sinuous strands of an epic journey in an old Dodge Wayfarer are stories of a lifetime of issues that continue to touch our...

Loopy legislation, crazy crimes and punishments – based on the TV series Beyond Belief!In Madagascar the law forbids pregnant women to wear hats or eat eels.In 1982, an elephant was arrested in Wisconsin on suspicion of murder.Minnesotans may not put male and female underwear next to each other on the clothes line.It sometimes seems that there is a law for everything these days – you never know when you could be risking arrest through some seemingly innocent...

Bordered by the Hudson River and the Berkshire Mountains, Columbia County is part of the famously picturesque Hudson Valley region. But look beyond the rolling hills to discover the secrets of Columbia County. A mastodon tooth rolled down a farmer's hill in Claverack, changing the world's understanding of prehistoric times. President Martin Van Buren lost his wife, Hannah, in Kinderhook and hardly mentioned her again. Hudson's gallows were the scene of New York's last hanging, as hundreds ...

Before Eldon Lee died at the age of ninety-six, he told his daughter about his lifes many adventures. These adventures begin in Little Egypt, deep in southern Illinois. His stories blend family history with tales of farming, school, hometown life, courtship, and entrepreneurial endeavors. He also recalls the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, the 1925 Tristate Tornado, working at the 193334 Century of Progress Exposition, dancing in Windy City ballrooms, becoming a family man, and serving in World W...

From woolly mammoths, through wolves and mountain lions, to the largest elk herd in the East. It begins in the heat of the tropics and continues through Ice Age Pennsylvania, from "King Coal" to Marcellus Shale. It is a story of Native Americans, pioneers and immigrants struggling for survival. Warriors, patriots, murderers and terrorists are all part of the history of a small town in Northcentral Pennsylvania. It is a unique story of men and women carving a home out of the wilderness, yet...

Join Ray and Diane Hadley as they retell the history of the communities that make up Jonesboro and Arkansas's Northeast Corner in vintage images. When Union soldiers returned North after the Civil War, they brought home stories of a sparsely populated area with bountiful timber and potential for homes and farms. Over the next 50 years, first by wagon train and then by railroads, settlers came to build not only homes and farms but also thriving communities in the Clay, Greene, and Craighead...