After enduring 10 harrowing years of the Great Depression, visitors to the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair found welcome relief in the fair's optimistic presentation of the "World of Tomorrow." Pavilions from America's largest corporations and dozens of countries were spread across a 1,216-acre site, showcasing the latest industrial marvels and predictions for the future intermingled with cultural displays from around the world. Well known for its theme structures, the Trylon and Perisphere, the fair was an intriguing mixture of technology, science, architecture, showmanship, and politics. Proclaimed by many as the most memorable world's fair ever held, it predicted wonderful times were ahead for the world even as the clouds of war were gathering. Through vintage photographs, most never published before, The 1939-1940 New York World's Fair recaptures those days when the eyes of the world were on New York and on the future.

Beautiful full-page color and b&w aerial photographs reveal the Bay Area's blessings of nature and way of life in an enclave unlike any other. Sections on the bay and bridges of the city, as well as the east, south, and north bay show why more than a quarter of a century ago, Holiday Magazine called San Francisco "the most attractive, most civilized, most desirable city in the country." Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

The view that slavery could best be described by those who had themselves experienced it personally has found expression in several thousand commentaries, autobiographies, narratives, and interviews with those who "endured." Although most of these accounts appeared before the Civil War, more than one-third are the result of the ambitious efforts of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to interview surviving ex-slaves during the 1930s. The result of these efforts was the Slave Narrative Collection, a group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves that today stands as one of the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA. Compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38, the collection consists of more than two thousand interviews with former slaves, most of them first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents' own reactions to bondage. The interviews afforded aged ex-slaves an unparalleled opportunity to give their personal accounts of life under the "peculiar institution," to describe in their own words what it felt like to be a slave in the United States. -Norman R. Yetman, American Memory, Library of Congress This paperback edition of selected Alabama narratives is reprinted in facsimile from the typewritten pages of the interviewers, just as they were originally typed.

Amarillo, the queen city of the Texas Panhandle, is known far beyond its immediate vicinity--the high tableland called the Llano Estacado. The famous highway Route 66 ran through the very heart of Amarillo. Alan Jackson, Emmylou Harris, Neil Sedaka, & James Durst each recorded a different song entitled 'Amarillo.' Named by 'True West' magazine as one of the fifty most western towns in America, this city of 176,000 people remains rooted in its western past--yet at the same time Amarillo's background & outlook have a distinctly Midwestern flavor.

In 2006, conservationists everywhere celebrated the 100th anniversary of professional forestry in Maryland, the Old Line State. Under the leadership of Fred Wilson Besley, Maryland's first and the nation's third state forester, scientific forest management and the larger conservation impulse became firmly ensconced. A protTgT of America's most famous forester, Gifford Pinchot, Besley moved aggressively to implement pioneering scientific and conservation practices that are commonplace today. Besley helped to stem the tide of forest loss from excessive logging and rampant fire, he started a state forest nursery and launched a program to reforest thousands of acres of "wasteland" along utilitarian principles, and, perhaps his greatest legacy, and he built an exemplary system of state forest reserves that today form the nucleus of Maryland's network of public lands. Although more than fifty years have passed since Besley's death, his legacy as a pioneer in conservation and forestry science lives on.Less well known to environmental historians is the city of Baltimore's extensive experience with professional forestry during the past century, a movement and legacy that is ongoing today.America's Conservation Impulse: A Century of Saving Trees in the Old Line State explores the roots and early history of professional forest management in Maryland in Baltimore and how that history coincides with AmericaÆs larger conservation impulse. Many of the ideas that he began here gained regional and national attention. The book also examines the unique challenges that resource managers and citizens alike have faced in the past and must confront in the future-in Maryland and across America-if we are to secure the survival of our forest heritage.

Everyone knows stories about the American Mafia and its varied forms of crime, from racketeering to stock manipulation to murder. American Mafia: Chicago explores the story of those families and their ties to the Windy City, revealing the events behind the legends and the history of the families' beginnings and founding members. The history of the Windy City is revealed through the stories of the exploits of its most notorious bad guys and perpetrators of mischief from the deadly Black Hand to Al Capone. Black and white historical photos throughout.

A lively account of the All-American humorist from Oklahoma. Rogers accrued his wide-angle popularity through dozens of films, a daily column that syndicated for nine years in the newspapers, and countless lectures and stageperformances. The book is filled with charming, revealing and delightful anecdotes about the 'cowboy philosopher' hailed by the New York Times as 'America's Aristophanes.' B&W photos. 288p.

Atlanta and Environs is, in every way, an exhaustive history of the Atlanta Area from the time of its settlement in the 1820s through the 1970s. Volumes I and II, together more than two thousand pages in length, represent a quarter century of research by their author, Franklin M. Garrett—a man called “a walking encyclopedia on Atlanta history” by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. With the publication of Volume III, by Harold H. Martin, this chronicle of the South’s most vibrant city incorporates the spectacular growth and enterprise that have characterized Atlanta in recent decades. The work is arranged chronologically, with a section devoted to each decade, a chapter to each year. Volume I covers the history of Atlanta and its people up to 1880—ranging from the city’s founding as “Terminus” through its Civil War destruction and subsequent phoenixlike rebirth. Volume II details Atlanta’s development from 1880 through the 1930s—including occurrences of such diversity as the development of the Coca-Cola Company and the Atlanta premiere of Gone with the Wind. Taking up the city’s fortunes in the 1940s, Volume III spans the years of Atlanta’s greatest growth. Tracing the rise of new building on the downtown skyline and the construction of Hartsfield International Airport on the city’s perimeter, covering the politics at City Hall and the box scores of Atlanta’s new baseball team, recounting the changing terms of race relations and the city’s growing support of the arts, the last volume of Atlanta and Environs documents the maturation of the South’s preeminent city.

On the banks of the Pacific Northwest's greatest river lies the Hanford nuclear reservation, an industrial site that appears to be at odds with the surrounding vineyards and desert. The 586-square mile compound on the Columbia in eastern Washington is known both for its origins as part of the Manhattan Project, which made the first atomic bombs, and for the monumental effort now under way to clean up forty-five years' of waste from manufacturing plutonium for the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Hanford routinely makes the news, as scientists, litigants, administrators, and politicians argue over its past and its future.It is easy to think about Hanford as an expression of federal power, a place apart from humanity and nature, but that view is a distortion of its history. Atomic Frontier Days looks through a wider lens, telling a complex story of production, community-building, politics, and environmental sensibilities. In brilliantly structured parallel stories, the authors bridge the divisions that accompany Hanford's headlines and offer perspective on today's controversies. Influenced as much by regional culture, economics, and politics as by war, diplomacy, and environmentalism, the story of Hanford and the Tri-Cities of Richland, Pasco, and Kennewick illuminates the history of the modern American West. John M. Findlay is professor of history at the University of Washington. His focus is social and urban history. Bruce Hevly is associate professor of history at the University of Washington. His focus is history of science and technology."Atomic Frontier Days captures one of the most interesting and controversial places in the American West in all its surprising particularity. Technologically sophisticated, shrewd, at once analytically unflinching and generous, it belongs on the short list of books necessary to understand the West and its complicated relation to the nation." -Richard White, author of The Organic Machine"This richly detailed study takes us beyond big government programs and corporate contracts to show people coping with the intricate dance of science and technology, warfare and welfare, the mess of making bombs and the business of cleaning up." -Virginia Scharff, Center for the Southwest, University of New Mexico