While in a different vein than her previous book about Route 66 (Route 66: The Highway and Its People) Quinta Scott has successfully captured the feeling and vision of what Route 66 has become to many -- the soul of America. Her black and white photographs, some taken in the early 1980s, some taken in the late 1990s, depict an essence of nostalgia toward "The Mother Road" that is just now being widely realized amongst a cross-section of America. State Route 66 Associations have been working together to preserve and protect this long ribbon of a historic monument, and Quinta Scott's book can aid in those efforts. This is your history, America. Read it, look at it, and remember it!

For over forty years, Joan Liffring-Zug Bourret has photographed Iowa's Amana villages and the people. The 1959 image earliest in the series, originally taken on assignment for The Iowan magazine is of workers eating lunch at the Colony Inn. The most recent images are of the color cover of tulips and trees blooming in South Amana, and of the 1999 Maifest.

The book begins with photographs of the Community of True Inspiration, the religion of the original Amana settlers, their churches and religious followers. The next section is "The Communal Legacy" with villagers, villages and artifacts left over from the days when the colonists followed a system of religious communal life. In 1932 they voted The Great Change to a free enterprise system with a corporation owning the 26,000 acres, mills and various businesses. The people could now own their own homes. A photograph taken in 1982 shows "Those Who Knew the Communal Way," The elderly fifty years after The Great Change. A final section titled "The Winds of Change" shows the traditions of Germany as celebrated in the Maifest and an Oktoberfest. The Amana Heritage Society documents its historic past in several museums. Over 100 black- and- white images are in the book.

The color section, "The Beautiful Amanas, The Amanas in Bloom," has 13 photographs, ending with two views of the Native American Fish Dam on the Iowa river prior to the destruction of the dam in the floods of 1993.

A Foreword by Lanny Haldy, Executive Director of the Amana Heritage Society, and a Preface by Abigail Foerstner, photography critic, contribute to an understanding of the community and the photographs.

In her introduction, Joan writes, "the spirit of love and friendship, religious faith, and traditions continues today even through the vast winds of change in the Colonies and America.

An exhibition of the photographs complements the book.

This book is the best analysis of Austrian identity on the market. If you have ever wanted to know what the relationship between Austrian and German is all about and what the term Austrian has meant in different historical periods, you will find the answer here. The book combines sophisticated historical methods with accessible language and is written in an admirably objective tone. It is innovative history writing at its best and has become an instant favorite of mine.

This book provides basic information about the Gilded Age. Although not in as much detail as some other books on the topic (e.g. America in the Gilded Age, The New Commonwealth), it covers all of the major events. It is very easy to read and contains photographs. At the end of each chapter (divided by years) are primary source documents, which are a nice addition not found in the other books I mentioned.

An interesting biography of a man dedicated to the agricultural independence of the West. I also enjoyed reading about the details of dam building coupled with the sacrifice of the workers to acomplish these magnificent feats of engineering. Reading about the life and hardships of the workers on Hoover Dam, during the Great Depression, was very educational. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to read a good biography or learn about the engineering challenges of dam building.

This volume includes information on the Southern Region cities. I'll list, since Amazon does not provide details.

These are the cities covered in this volume:
Atlanta, Ga
Austin, TX
Baton Rouge, LI
Birmingham, AL
Chattanooga, TN
Columbia, SC
Dallas, TX
El Paso, TX
Fort Lauderdale, FL
Fort Worth, TX
Houston, TX
Huntsville, AL
Jackson, MS
Jacksonville, FL
Knoxville, TN
Memphis, TN
Miami, FL
Nashville, TN
New Orleans, LA
Orlando, FL
Plano, TX
Saint Petersburg, FL
San Antonio, TX
Savannah, GA
Tampa, FL

As in all this series, this volume provides well laid-out information in an array of categories. Not only statistical information, but factual information as well (What are the hospitals in the area? Where are the large event centers?)

Broken into two categories: Business Environment and Living Environment

Business Environment information includes:
Municipal Finances, Population, Income, Bankruptcy, Employment & Earnings, Taxes, Commercial Real Estate, Residential Real Estate, Transportation, Roadway Congestion Index, Business Headquarters, Hotels & Motels, Convention Centers

Living Environment information includes:
Cost of Living, Housing, Residential Utilities, Health Care, Education, Major Employers, Public Safety, Hazardous Waste, Culture & Recreation, Media, Climate, Air & Water Quality, and Election results

Plus, it includes additional comparative tables in the appendices.

Fascinating reference for personal or professional use.

Whereas, Alexis de Tocqueville offers his perspective on America as an outside observer, the literary genius James Fenimore Cooper offers his assessment of culture, politics and society in 19th century America. He doesn't hold democracy to be sacrosanct like we do today, but rather like any other system of government with its advantages and disadvantages. His look at the nature of liberty and its relation with equality is particularly intriguing.

He is cognizant of the dangers posed to American self-government, which values legal equality. Equality, is a virtue, only insofar as it pertains to equal rights and equality before the law. Any effort at establishing equality of outcome is tantamount to tyranny and opposed to liberty. Cooper illustrates the precarious relationship between liberty and equality. Unless, tradition, custom, the rule of law and the Constitution are revered and upheld- the American Polity could easily collapse into majoritarian tyranny under a demagogue.

One gains an appreciation of the system of government established by the American founding fathers after reading this book... They established a constitutionally-limited federal republic, with limits not only on the power of government, but with limits placed on the power of majority rule, so as to limit the fundamental role of government to protecting the rights of its citizens. This constitutional republic sought to balance out monarchial, democratic, and aristocratic elements...

The book describes everything about the furtrade in the American west.It describes the hunters and trappers,the history of the furtrade west from 1807 to 1843,the Santa Fe trade,how the western country looked like and the indians.It was very interesting because it described so much.It should have described the hunters equipment better.

This volume by Hollinger and Capper is the first of two in their ambitious goal to "round up" and compile a representative sampling of documents in American Intellectual History. They succeed brilliantly.

Volume I logically starts with the Pilgrims and ends with the Civil War and is divided neatly into component chapters with contributions from John Winthrop, Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards ("Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" is just breathtaking...), Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams (the founding fathers section), on through Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson (Transcendentalism), to Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody to John C. Calhoun, George Fitzhugh, Martin Delaney, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.

The editors provide a small biographical sketch of each author that precedes the selection and the selections track a wide range of issues including race relations, relations between the North and the South, the enfranchisement of women, American exceptionalism (Winthrop's "City on a Hill"), the formation of the United States, transcendentalism (the seedling for America's first original philosophy, Pragmatism). These issues are picked up later and expanded (or concluded) in Volume II of the work.

Volume II of Hollinger and Capper's work is as excellent as the first.

Volume II contains contributions from American writers such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Susan Sontag, Malcolm X, Rienhold Niebuhr, Noam Chomsky, John Crowe Ransom, Betty Friedan, John Dewey, W.E.B. DuBois, H.L. Mencken, Jane Addams, Woodrow Wilson, Samuel Huntington, etc.

Volume II traces the developments of race relations in America, the advancement of minorities and women in America, American foreign relations, insight into the state of the South after the Civil War, the effect of transportation revolutions on interstate travel as well as traces the development of Pragmatism, America's contribution to the world of Philosophy from Charles Sanders Peirce to William James to Thomas Kuhn to Richard Rorty.

Simply put, the topical treatment of this work is first rate and the collection of these various works is a creditable contribution to the field of American Intellectual History.