Located on the site of the original Sears Tower, the historic Sears, Roebuck and Company catalog plant is one of the nation's most unique landmarks. Representing American ingenuity at its best, Richard Sears and Julius Rosenwald combined technology, commerce, and social science with bricks and mortar to build "the World's Largest Store" on Chicago's West Side. Completed in 1906, the plant housed nearly every conceivable product of the time: clothing, jewelry, furniture, appliances, tools, and more. The complex employed 20,000 people, and merchandise orders were processed and delivered by rail -- within the same day. During the first two decades of the 20th century, almost half of America's families shopped the over 300 million catalogs published in that era. WLS (World's Largest Store) Radio broadcasted the Gene Autrey show from the top of the tower, and the first Sears retail store opened here on Homan Avenue and Arthington Street. In 1974, Sears moved to the current Sears Tower. Thanks to many individuals who fought to save these architecturally and historically important treasures, the administration building, the original Sears Tower, the catalog press-laboratory building, and the powerhouse remain today. There are currently plans for redeveloping these buildings into housing, office, and retail space. A new Homan Square Community Center stands on the site of the merchandise building.

This book outlines the history of the Minorcan colony that settled in and around St. Augustine, Florida.

A notable sanitarium site in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the southwestern San Bernardino County area that became known as Loma Linda, meaning "pretty hill," was originally dubbed Mound City and now includes the historic communities of Bryn Mawr, Cottonwood Row, and Idlewild. The place evolved further as a center for the treatment of medical and mental illness when the Seventh-day Adventists, particularly one of their visionary authors, Ellen G. White, recognized the need for another sanitarium within the geographic triangle formed by the cities of San Bernardino, Riverside, and Redlands. Citrus fortunes also enlivened the economy from the 1870s through the World War II years, and Loma Linda was incorporated as a city in 1970. The world-class Loma Linda University Medical Center and the Seventh-day Adventists combine to still shape the area's politics, economy, and culture.

The Kashaya Indians made foot trails through the grassy mountain slopes of Sonoma's northern coast for centuries before colonists from the Russian-American Company arrived in 1812. These Russians, the vanguard of European settlement, built Fort Ross from virgin redwood on a bluff overlooking the sea. Although they stayed only 30 years, they left behind a heritage that includes the earliest detailed scientific and ethnographic studies of the area and California's first ships and windmills. Soon others came to ranch, lumber, and quarry, shipping their harvest and stone to help build and feed San Francisco. Ranches and mill sites evolved into towns, often bearing the names of the rugged men who first settled there. Much of the coastline remains as it was in centuries past, its rich history still visible in ship moorings and chiseled sandstone, and new residents and visitors are still drawn to this dramatic meeting of blue Pacific and forested coastal mountains.