Living off the land—hunting, fishing, and farming, along with a range of specialized crafts that provided barter or cash income—was a way of life that persisted well into the twentieth century in the Big Thicket of southeast Texas. Before this way of life ended with World War II, professional photographer Larry Jene Fisher spent a decade between the 1930s and 1940s photographing Big Thicket people living and working in the old ways. His photographs, the only known collection on this subjec...

Michael Crichton, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Jurassic Park, returns to the world of paleontology in this recently discovered novel-a thrilling adventure set in the Wild West during the golden age of fossil hunting.The year is 1876. Warring Indian tribes still populate Americas western territories even as lawless gold-rush towns begin to mark the landscape. In much of the country it is still illegal to espouse evolution. Against t...

Most people think of New Jersey as a suburban-industrial corridor that runs between New York and Philadelphia. Yet in the low center of the state is a near wilderness, larger than most national parks, which has been known since the seventeenth century as the Pine Barrens.The term refers to the predominant trees in the vast forests that cover the area and to the quality of the soils below, which are too sandy and acid to be good for farming. On all sides, however, developments of on...

The Sluicebox Series is a collection of interesting facts and entertaining fiction about the Fraser River Gold Rush and the Cariboo Gold Rush of the 1800s in British Columbia.Read how Francis Jones Barnard's express company grew from just a two-horse wagon to a fleet of stagecoaches that provided regular passenger and freight service along the Cariboo Wagon Road.Issue one includes BX Holdup, a mystery about a stagecoach robbery during the summer of 1865 and Constable Stokes' ...

Classic Deer Camps is a trip through time, back to the core of America's deer-hunting heritage.In this unique book you will revisit 19th century deer camps through a spectacular collection of writings, historical biography of famous deer camps and nostalgic artwork, plus you'll rediscover the freedom, solitude and camaraderie of this shared rite of passage. Short of providing the faint smell of beans and backstraps cooking on the fire, this book brings you to the heart and...

“WANTED. YOUNG, SKINNY, WIRY FELLOWS. NOT OVER 18. MUST BE EXPERT RIDERS. WILLING TO RISK DEATH DAILY. ORPHANS PREFERRED.”—California newspaper help-wanted ad, 1860The Pony Express is one of the most celebrated and enduring chapters in the history of the United States, a story of the all-American traits of bravery, bravado, and entrepreneurial risk that are part of the very fabric of the Old West. No image of the American West in the mid-1800s is more familiar, more beloved,...

Start your engines and follow the backroads, the historical paths, and the scenic landscape that were fashioned by geologic Ice Ages and traveled by Big Thicket explorers as well as contemporary park advocatesall as diverse as the Big Thicket itself. From Spanish missionaries to Jayhawkers, and from timber barons to public officials, you will meet some unusual characters who inhabited an exceptional region. The Big Thicket and its National Preserve contain plants and animals from deserts a...

Open a copy of the Information Please Almanac and turn to the chapter on famous people. 4000 names and you won't know hardly any. But what about names everyone knows? Pillsbury, Kellogg, Gerber. Nowhere to be found. How many names are more famous than Howard Johnson or Oscar Mayer? But who were these folks? Let's take a look at the men behind the names we see keeping up the house.

Discover the ghosts who wander these upstate New York mountains—includes photos!Washington Irving called the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York a "spellbound region"—and the ghosts that linger from more than four hundred years of history provide proof of Irving's intuition.In Hudson, Maggie Houghtaling's ghost haunts the Register-Star building, where she was hanged in 1817 for murdering her child—a crime for which she was later cleared. The ghost of a y...

When James Marshall found a small, soft shiny stone in a California stream, he knew it could only be one thing: Gold! His cry of discovery would be heard around the world. In the third installment of Don Brown's Actual Times series, Gold! Gold from the American River! is the story of the California gold rush--the uncharted journey across hostile land, the laborious process of panning for gold, the success of savvy entrepreneurs, and the fortunes of the marginalized, from slaves and America...

One of the Midwest's best-loved authors tells the story of his land, from the last great glacier that dug out its valleys and formed its hills, to his own family's 40 year relationship with the beloved farm they call Roshara. In this quiet but epic tale, Apps describes the Native Americans who lived on the land for hundreds of years, tapping the maple trees and fishing the streams and lakes, as well as the first white settlers who tilled its sandy acres, plowing the native grasses that gre...