Saguaro cacti, desert landscapes, and the Grand Canyon may stand out as prominent Arizona features, but this scorching state is also home to bizarre places, personalities, events, and phenomena. These unique and quirky aspects are humorously displayed in Arizona Curiosities, a cross between a wacky news gazette, an almanac, and a humorous travel guide.

Jamie and Todd are horrified to learn that the grand plan, which they thought had been defeated, might be about to be implemented in 1775, America. Hector and Catherine have to go back in time and thwart Travis - an agent of the grand plan - who is hell bent on world domination. Jamie and Todd go with Hector and Catherine on a mission to 1775, to prevent a super gun from being used in the battle of bunker hill, during the American war of independence, but they have only days to stop history from being altered.

Tales of hauntings, strange happenings and other local lore throughout the Centennial state!

The complexity of the American economy and polity has grown at an explosive rate in our era of globalization. Yet as the 2008 financial crisis revealed, the evolution of the American state has not proceeded apace. The crisis exposed the system's manifold political and economic dysfunctionalities.
Featuring a cast of leading scholars working at the intersection of political science and American history, The Unsustainable American State is a historically informed account of the American state's development from the nineteenth century to the present. It focuses in particular on the state-produced inequalities and administrative incoherence that became so apparent in the post-1970s era. Collectively, the book offers an unsettling account of the growth of racial and economic inequality, the ossification of the state, the gradual erosion of democracy, and the problems deriving from imperial overreach. Utilizing the framework of sustainability, a concept that is currently informing some of the best work on governance and development, the contributors show how the USA's current trajectory does not imply an impending collapse, but rather a gradual erosion of capacity and legitimacy. That is a more appropriate theoretical framework, they contend, because for all of its manifest flaws, the American state is durable. That durability, however, does not preclude a long relative decline.

Making sense of the wars for Vietnam has had a long history. The question why Vietnam? dominated American and Vietnamese political life for much of length of the Vietnam wars and has continued to be asked in the three decades since they ended. The essays in this inaugural volume of the National History Centres book series Reinterpreting History examine the conceptual and methodological shifts that mark the contested terrain of Vietnam war scholarship. They range from top-down reconsiderations of critical decision-making moments in Washington, Hanoi, and Saigon to microhistories of the war that explore its meanings from the bottom up. Some draw on recently available Vietnamese-language archival materials. Others mine new primary sources in the United States or from France, Great Britain, the former Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. Collectively, these essays map the interpretative histories of the Vietnam wars: past, present, and future. They also raise questions about larger meanings and the ongoing relevance of the wars for Vietnam in American, Vietnamese, and international histories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Massacres, mayhem, and mischief fill the pages of Outlaw Tales of Utah, 2nd Edition. Ride with horse thieves and cattle rustlers, stagecoach, and train robbers. Duck the bullets of murderers, plot strategies with con artists, hiss at lawmen turned outlaws. A refreshing new perspective on some of the most infamous reprobates of the Midwest.

In Sorcery in Salem, local author John Hardy Wright examines the witchcraft delusion that afflicted Salem Village and Salem Town in the winter of 1691-92. Twenty inhabitants lost their lives at that time; nineteen were hanged on Gallows Hill, and one elderly man, Giles Cory, by remaining mute as a personal protest to the proceedings of the court, was pressed to death under heavy weights. Once the prosecuting examinations began on March 1, 1692, local authorities were uncertain what course the following trials would take. Spectral evidence, in which the shape of a suspected witch tortured people, was a primary indication of guilt, as was the "touch test," in which a victim was released from the witch's power upon the laying on of hands. Not being able to correctly recite the Lord's Prayer was also damning.

Few teams in Georgia high school football can document their history as far back as the Bulldogs. Cedartown High School played its first game at the turn of the century, kicking off a historic tradition that endures today. Join author William Austin, born and raised in Cedartown, as he recounts the history of this proud football program. Austin covers the careers of expert coaches like Doc Ayers and John Hill and highlights the star players and crucial games that helped shape Cedartown's legacy of tough play on the gridiron. From that first game in 1900 to the 1946 conference champions, through the 1963 state champion team and all the way to the 2001 state championship game, here for the first time is the history of Bulldogs football.

Easternmost of the Great Lakes, Lake Ontario is bordered by both New York and Ontario. Upon its pristine surface, countless vessels have sailed, but its bottom depths are littered with the skeletons of shipwrecks, including Fleetwing, caught and destroyed in one of the sudden storms that often turn this sea-like lake deadly. Daring mariners, male and female, have seen their share of peril, and battles during wars between Britain and the US and Canada have also been waged here. From Huron canoes to today's "Sunday Sailors" who venture from shore only during warmer months, local author Susan Gateley tells some of the lake's most exciting stories.

It Happened in Kansas will feature over 25 chapters in Kansas history. Lively and entertaining, this book will bring the varied and fascinating history of the Sunflower State to life.

Andre Laurendeau was the most widely respected French-Canadian nationalist of his generation. The story of his life is to a striking degree also the story of French-Canadian nationalism from the 1930s to the 1960s, that period of massive societal change when Quebec evolved from a traditional to a modern society. The most insightful intellectual voice of the nationalist movement, he was at the tumultuous centre of events as a young separatist in the 1930s; an anti-conscription activist and reform-minded provincial politician in the 1940s; and an influential journalist, editor of the Montreal daily Le Devoir, in the 1950s. At the same time he played an important role in Quebec's cultural life both as a novelist and playwright and as a well-known radio and television personality. In tracing his life story, this biography sheds indispensable light not only on the development of Laurendeau's own nationalist thought, but on his people's continuing struggle to preserve the national values that make them distinct.

Unitarians established a church in the nation's capital in 1821, and the first Universalist sermon in Washington was presented at city hall in 1827. Since these beginnings, Washington-area Unitarians and Universalists have created congregations that affirm ideals of religious liberalism: a commitment to religious freedom, a reasoned approach to faith, a hopeful view of human capacities to create a better world, and the belief that God is most authentically known as love. Images of America: Unitarians and Universalists of Washington, D.C. features prominent figures such as Robert Little, an English Unitarian who fled his native land and became minister of First Unitarian Church of Washington; political rivals John Quincy Adams and John C. Calhoun, both founding members of the congregation; and Clara Barton, who organized the American Red Cross after her experiences on the battlefields during the Civil War. In 1961, Unitarians and Universalists joined together, and the story continues as Unitarian Universalists interpret the values of religious liberalism for each new generation.

South Carolina's Indian-American governor Nikki Haley recently dismissed one of her principal advisors when his membership to the ultra-conservative Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) came to light. Among the CCC's many concerns is intermarriage and race mixing. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, in 2001 the CCC website included a message that read "God is the one who divided mankind into different races.... Mixing the races is rebelliousness against God. " Beyond the irony of a CCC member working for an Indian-American, the episode reveals America's continuing struggle with race, racial integration, and race mixing. The Color Factor shows that the emergent twenty-first-century recognition of race mixing and the relative advantages of light-skinned, mixed-race people represents a "back to the future " moment--a re-emergence of one salient feature of race in America that dates to its founding. Each chapter addresses from a historical perspective a topic in the current literature on mixed-race and color. The approach is economic and empirical, but the text is accessible to social scientists more generally. The historical evidence concludes that we will not really understand race until we understand how American attitudes toward race were shaped by race mixing.

The nineteenth-century middle-class ideal of the married woman was of a chaste and diligent wife focused on being a loving mother, with few needs or rights of her own. The modern woman, by contrast, was partner to a new model of marriage, one in which she and her husband formed a relationship based on greater sexual and psychological equality. In Making Marriage Modern, Christina Simmons narrates the development of this new companionate marriage ideal, which took hold in the early twentieth century and prevailed in American society by the 1940s.
The first challenges to public reticence to discuss sexual relations between husbands and wives came from social hygiene reformers, who advocated for a scientific but conservative sex education to combat prostitution and venereal disease. A more radical group of feminists, anarchists, and bohemians opposed the Victorian model of marriage and even the institution of marriage. Birth control advocates such as Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger openly championed women's rights to acquire and use effective contraception. The "companionate marriage" emerged from these efforts. This marital ideal was characterized by greater emotional and sexuality intimacy for both men and women, use of birth control to create smaller families, and destigmatization of divorce in cases of failed unions. Simmons examines what she calls the "flapper" marriage, in which free-spirited young wives enjoyed the early years of marriage, postponing children and domesticity. She looks at the feminist marriage in which women imagined greater equality between the sexes in domestic and paid work and sex. And she explores the African American "partnership marriage," which often included wives' employment and drew more heavily on the involvement of the community and extended family. Finally, she traces how these modern ideals of marriage were promoted in sexual advice literature and marriage manuals of the period.
Though male dominance persisted in companionate marriages, Christina Simmons shows how they called for greater independence and satisfaction for women and a new female heterosexuality. By raising women's expectations of marriage, the companionate ideal also contained within it the seeds of second-wave feminists' demands for transforming the institution into one of true equality between the sexes.