In the 1920s and 1930s, Oregons legendary bridge engineer Conde B. McCullough designed a first-rate collection of aesthetic bridges on the Oregon Coast Highway to enhance an already dramatic and beautiful landscape. The six largest of these, at Gold Beach, Newport, Waldport, Florence, Reedsport, and Coos Bay, eliminated the last ferries on the Oregon Coast Highway between the Columbia River and California. McCullough planned to build one bridge each year after completion of the Rogue River Bridge at Gold Beach in 1932, but the tightening grip of the Depression threatened his plans. In 1933, McCullough and his staff worked day and night to finish plans for the remaining five bridges, and in early 1934, the Public Works Administration funded simultaneous construction of them. The combined projects provided approximately 630 jobs, but at least six workers perished during construction. After the bridges were complete, Oregon coast tourism increased by a dramatic 72 percent in the first year.

The black community in the Ann Arbor area includes Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Second Baptist Church, Brown Chapel, the Ann Arbor Community Center, the old Jones School, and other well-remembered places. The photographs representing this history follow the progress of the African American community from 1857, when the Rev. J. M. Gregory gathered together a small congregation at 504 High Street, to 1996, when Dr. Homer Neal assumed leadership of the University of Michigan as its interim president. This integral but little-known part of Ann Arbor area history is preserved in Another Ann Arbor.

As Remembering St. Petersburg, Florida, More Sunshine City Stories unfolds, it is the dawn of 1913. North of Central Avenue the members of the St. Petersburg Women's Club are beginning to advance city improvements. South of Central Avenue black children are witnessing the opening of Davis Academy, an institution that will help prepare them to tear down the walls of hardship and prejudice. Within the past decade, author Scott Taylor Hartzell has chronicled the Sunshine City's history for the St. Petersburg Times and in his books, St. Petersburg: An Oral History and Remembering St. Petersburg, Florida, Sunshine City Stories. He has tirelessly promoted the city's history to middle school students, lecture audiences at Eckerd and St. Petersburg colleges, and numerous groups and civic organizations. This book furthers his efforts in grand fashion, offering a look at St. Petersburg's history that cannot be found anywhere else.

Nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, hidden in the northeast region of Georgia, lies - literally and figuratively - one of the Peach State's most treasured areas. Dahlonega, Georgia is known primarily as the site of the first major United States gold rush. But now, as the gold dust has settled, we can look back on the town's complex history - a history more valuable than its famous abundance of precious metal. Dahlonega, Georgia: A Brief History, is not to be confused with works focusing solely on the distant past. The most up-to-date account available, Dahlonega, Georgia even includes the famous 2006 discovery of gold underneath an old hotel. Anne Dismukes Amerson, author of "The Best of I Remember Dahlonega," once again brings vitality and passion to her account as she explores the intriguing history of this beautiful Georgia city.

On June 29, 1776, Fr. Francisco Palou dedicated the first site of Mission San Francisco de Asis on the shores of Dolores Lagoon. At the time, it was a just a patch in the village of Chutchuii, the home of the Ohlone people, and Palou could never have foreseen the vibrant city that would eventually spring up around the humble settlement. The final mission building, popularly known as Mission Dolores and San Francisco's oldest complete structure, was dedicated on August 2, 1791, at what became Sixteenth and Dolores Streets. After the gold rush, the district around the mission began its dramatic evolution to the diverse area we know today, a bustling mix of immigrants from other states, Europe, and South and Central America.

In recent years, San Francisco has been synonymous with gay and lesbian pride, and the various achievements of the gay and lesbian community are personified in the city by the bay. The tumultuous and ongoing struggles for this community's civil rights from the 1950s to the present are well documented, but queer culture itself goes back much further than that, in fact all the way back to the California gold rush.

Texas and California are the leaders of Red and Blue America. As the nation has polarized, its most populous and economically powerful states have taken charge of the opposing camps. These states now advance sharply contrasting political and policy agendas and view themselves as competitors for control of the nation's future. Kenneth P. Miller provides a detailed account of the rivalry's emergence, present state, and possible future. First, he explores why, despite their many similarities, the two states have become so deeply divided. As he shows, they experienced critical differences in their origins and in their later demographic, economic, cultural, and political development. Second, he describes how Texas and California have constructed opposing, comprehensive policy models-one conservative, the other progressive. Miller highlights the states' contrasting policies in five areas-tax, labor, energy and environment, poverty, and social issues-and also shows how Texas and California have led the red and blue state blocs in seeking to influence federal policy in these areas. The book concludes by assessing two models' strengths, vulnerabilities, and future prospects. The rivalry between the two states will likely continue for the foreseeable future, because California will surely stay blue and Texas will likely remain red. The challenge for the two states, and for the nation as a whole, is to view the competition in a positive light and turn it to productive ends. Exploring one of the primary rifts in American politics, Texas vs. California sheds light on virtually every aspect of the country's political system.

Orcas Island, the largest of the 172 islands in San Juan County, lies in the Salish Sea north of Puget Sound. Known as the "Gem of the San Juans" for her shimmering emerald hills bounded by 125 miles of rocky, tree-lined shore, Orcas was home to countless generations of Native Americans before the arrival of its first white settlers, formerly Hudson's Bay men who had hunted on the island, in the late 1850s. An international boundary dispute, popularly known as the Pig War, prevented early pioneers from settling land claims until the dispute was resolved by the German kaiser in 1872. Settlement grew slowly until improved steamship routes and increased commerce brought more tourists to the island. In 1906, Robert Moran built a fabulous estate, Rosario, now a world-class resort. Thousands of visitors have been coming to Orcas Island over the years to explore her forested hills, camp in Moran State Park or stay at one of the many historic resorts, and fish in the pristine waters surrounding this island paradise.

Folly Beach native Gretchen Stringer-Robinson takes the reader through a history of this delightful beach town covering the war years, the innocence of the fifties, the recession of the seventies, Hurricane Hugo and times in between. Visiting colorful characters and beautiful locations, this book will be enjoyed by both residents and visitors.

With this powerful, evocative new book, St. Petersburg residents Jon Wilson and Rosalie Peck present an informative narrative that explores the history of St. Petersburg, Florida's most vibrant African American neighborhood: 22nd Street South or ?the deuces.? Throughout the city's history, no other area has personified strength for the African American community like this segregation-era thoroughfare. A haven during the brutal Jim Crow years, 22nd Street South was a place where prominent businessmen and community leaders were the role models and residents and neighbors looked out for one another. The close-knit community encouraged strong, positive values even as its members were treated as second-class citizens in the wider world. Authors Wilson and Peck tell the story of this unique district and how its people and events contributed to and helped to shape the history of St. Petersburg in the context of the greater South and the Civil Rights Movement.

The first major volume to place U.S.-centered labor history in a transnational or U.S.-in-the-world focus, Workers Across the Americas collects the newest work of leading Canadianist, Caribbeanist, and Latin American specialists, as well as U.S. historians. As distinct from comparative histories built around the integrity of their nation-state subjects, these essays highlight both the supra- or sub-national aspect of selected topics without ignoring the power of nation-states themselves as historical forces. Indeed, the transnational focus opens new avenues for understanding changes in the concepts, policies and practice of states, their interactions with each other and their populations, and the ways in which the popular classes resist, react, and use both nation-state and non-state entities to advance their interests. What does this transnational turn encompass? And what are its likely perils as well as promise as a framework for research and analysis? To address these questions six eminent scholars (John French, Julie Greene, Neville Kirk, Aviva Chomsky, Dirk Hoerder, and Vic Satzewich) lead off the volume with their own critical commentaries on the very project of transnational labor history. Their responses effectively offer a tour of explanations, tensions, and cautions in the evolution of a new arena of research and writing. Thereafter, Workers Across the Americas groups fifteen research essays around themes of Labor and Empire, Indigenous Peoples and Labor Systems, International Feminism and Reproductive Labor, Labor Recruitment and Immigration Control, Transnational Labor Politics, and Labor Internationalism. Topics range from military labor in the British Empire to coffee workers on the Guatemalan/Mexican border to the Atlantic white slavery traffic to the role of the International Labor Organization in attempting to set common labor standards. Leading scholars-including Camille Guerin-Gonzalez, Alex Lichtenstein, Nelson Lichtenstein, Colleen O'Neill, Premilla Nadasen, and Bryan Palmer-introduce each section and also make recommendations for further reading.

The advocates of woman suffrage and black suffrage came to a bitter falling-out in the midst of Reconstruction, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed the 15th Amendment for granting black men the right to vote but not women. How did these two causes, so long allied, come to this? In a lively narrative of insider politics, betrayal, deception, and personal conflict, Fighting Chance offers fresh answers to this question and reveals that racism was not the only cause, but that the outcome also depended heavily on money and political maneuver. Historian Faye Dudden shows that Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, believing they had a fighting chance to win woman suffrage after the Civil War, tried but failed to exploit windows of political opportunity, especially in Kansas. When they became most desperate, they succeeded only in selling out their long-held commitment to black rights and their invaluable friendship and alliance with Frederick Douglass. Based on extensive research, Fighting Chance is a major contribution to women's history and to 19th-century political history.

It's hard to imagine cows walking up Third Street or sheep on Innes Avenue, yet a large portion of the area known today as Bayview Hunters Point was once extremely rural. Called Butchertown by locals, the neighborhood was a source of much of San Francisco's food. Over the years, it evolved into an interesting combination of residences, businesses, and industries. The area was home to slaughterhouses, tanneries, tallow works, a saddle shop, the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, numerous boat yards including the legendary Allemand Brothers Boat Repair, and the U.S. Naval operations at Hunters Point Shipyard. Alongside these entities lived thousands of residents with unique stories and lifestyles.

Columbia started life in 1850 when Dr. Thaddeus Hildreth and his brother set up the camp known as Hildreth's Diggins in the lovely Sierra foothills. More than 150 tumultuous years later, Columbia is an amazing example of a true gold rush community frozen in time. But this is no ghost town either -- the downtown area, with its plank sidewalks, ornate hotels, and saloons, is preserved as a California State Historic Park. The town today is a living, breathing, modern community at peace with both its past and its present. It's easy to imagine characters from the Old West swaggering through these streets, which served as the backdrop to Gary Cooper's Marshall Will Kane in High Noon. Of course, given Columbia's frequent historical reenactments, one doesn't have to think too hard to conjure such imagery.

Eleanor Roosevelt's character was shaped by the history and culture of the Hudson Valley. More than that, Eleanor Roosevelt loved the Hudson Valley. A woman who knew and cared for the whole world chose this place, Val-Kill, as her home in a cottage by a stream. Eleanor Roosevelt: A Hudson Valley Remembrance reflects her unaffected simplicity and caring interest in her neighbors' concerns. Remembered by friends, colleagues, neighbors, and young people, these qualities inspired a community-based group to lead efforts to save her home in 1977 as the country's first national historic site dedicated to a First Lady. The Eleanor Roosevelt Center at Val-Kill continues her work on issues that affect life today.

Morgan Hill lies at the foot of stately El Toro Mountain in southern Santa Clara Valley. Martin Murphy Sr. settled here in 1845, and only a generation later the Murphy family had managed to acquire 70,000 acres. Martin's son Daniel owned over a million acres in the western United States when his only daughter, the beautiful Diana, secretly married Hiram Morgan Hill in 1882. Hiram and Diana inherited part of the original ranch, where they built their lovely Villa Mira Monte. Although the Southern Pacific Railroad tried to name the nearby depot "Huntington," passengers always asked to stop at Morgan Hill's ranch, a popular christening of a community surrounded by thriving orchards and vineyards. After World War II, Morgan Hill became a desirable suburb and has remained so through the birth of Silicon Valley.

In the early 20th century, there was no better example of a classic American downtown than Los Angeles. Since World War II, Los Angeles's Historic Core has been "passively preserved," with most of its historic buildings left intact. Recent renovations of the area for residential use and the construction of Disney Hall and the Staples Center are shining a new spotlight on its many pre-1930s Beaux Arts, Art Deco, and Spanish Baroque buildings.

"Waging a counterinsurgency war and justified by claims of 'an agreement between Guatemala and God, ' Guatemala's Evangelical Protestant military dictator General Rios Montt incited a Mayan holocaust: over just 17 months, some 86,000 mostly Mayan civilians were murdered. Virginia Garrard-Burnett dives into the horrifying, bewildering murk of this episode, the Western hemisphere's worst twentieth-century human rights atrocity. She has delivered the most lucid historical account and analysis we yet possess of what happened and how, of the cultural complexities, personalities, and local and international politics that made this tragedy. Garrard-Burnett asks the hard questions and never flinches from the least comforting answers. Beautifully, movingly, and clearly written and argued, this is a necessary and indispensable book."
-- Francisco Goldman, author of The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?
"Virginia Garrard-Burnett's Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit is impressively researched and argued, providing the first full examination of the religious dimensions of la violencia - a period of extreme political repression that overwhelmed Guatemala in the 1980s. Garrard-Burnett excavates the myriad ways Christian evangelical imagery and ideals saturated political and ethical discourse that scholars usually treat as secular. This book is one of the finest contributions to our understanding of the violence of the late Cold War period, not just in Guatemala but throughout Latin America."
--Greg Grandin, Professor of History, New York University
Drawing on newly-available primary sources including guerrilla documents, evangelical pamphlets, speech transcripts, and declassified US government records, Virginia Garrard-Burnett provides aa fine-grained picture of what happened during the rule of Guatelaman president-by-coup Efrain Rios Montt. She suggests that three decades of war engendered an ideology of violence that cut not only vertically, but also horizontally, across class, cultures, communities, religions, and even families. The book examines the causality and effects of the ideology of violence, but it also explores the long duree of Guatemalan history between 1954 and the late 1970s that made such an ideology possible. More significantly, she contends that self-interest, willful ignorance, and distraction permitted the human rights tragedies within Guatemala to take place without challenge from the outside world."

One Unitarian preacher prefaces his opposition to the invasion of Iraq by insisting that meaningful religion is a process of "ongoing revelation." He pits this essential "liberal" tenet against the closed-canon biblicism of "the Fundamentalists who find in their Holy Book the blueprints for war, who discover in the prejudices of ancient peoples the legitimization of oppression today," and concludes by invoking Ralph Waldo Emerson as his authority on the necessity of continuing revelation. Elsewhere, a conservative evangelical Christian observes the Episcopalian convention that nearly dissolved over the ordination of a homosexual bishop and is disgusted by the "ease with which ... clergy and laity speak of an open canon." We must be, he sarcastically suggests, "all Latter-day Saints now." Why did these two men revert to religious innovations of the antebellum era - Transcendentalism in one case, Mormonism in the other - to frame their understanding of contemporary religious struggles? David Holland argues that the generation from which Emerson and Mormonism emerged might be considered the United States' revelatory moment. From Shakers to Hicksite Quakers, from the obscure African American prophetess Rebecca Jackson to the celebrated theologian Horace Bushnell, people throughout antebellum Americans advocated the idea of an open canon. Holland tells their stories and considers their place within the main currents of American thought. He shows that in the antebellum era, the notion of an open canon appeared to many to be a timely idea, and that this period marked the beginning of a distinctive and persistent engagement with the possibility of continuing revelation. This idea would attain deep significance in the intellectual history of the United States. Sacred Borders deftly analyzes the positions of the most prominent advocates of continuing revelation, and engages the essential issues to which the concept of an open canon was inextricably bound. Holland offers a new perspective of the matter of cultural authority in a democratized society, the tension between subjective truths and communal standards, a rising historical consciousness, the expansion of print capitalism, and the principle of religious freedom.

Ride the trolley up the ridge of Beacon Hill and discover one of South Seattle's most interesting districts. Unique among Seattle neighborhoods, Beacon Hill is a community where immigrants from all over the globe have settled side by side for over 100 years. This new book tells the story of the people and businesses of Beacon Hill in vintage photographs, the majority of which date before World War II. Readers will learn about the immigrants who worked on farms, opened shops, and labored in shipyards, the building of Jefferson Park, as well as the activism and political struggles that shaped the Beacon Hill neighborhood.