Frontiersmen. Aviators. Ballplayers. Showpeople. Flops and failures. Dreamers and heroes. These are just some of the characters in OUR PEOPLE. In OUR PEOPLE George Washington fights for his western Pennsylvania lands; and Pittsburghers cheer Abraham Lincoln on the way to his inauguration. Here is Uniontown's fabulous coal land baron J.V. Thompson; Scottdale's intrepid pioneer pilot J.D. Hill; and Tin Pan Alley's Hughie Cannon, whose burial in Connellsville put an end to the music. In the pages of OUR PEOPLE strides Richard King Mellon, responsible for the rebirth of both Pittsburgh and Ligonier; and four Somerset County boys struggling to overcome the ravages of the Great Depression. Here is Jack Garner, actor and star pitcher, and Gilbert Simpson of early Perryopolis, Washington's overseer of lands and chief nemesis.

Grand Salute captures the kaleidoscope of World War II America and its surprising aftermath. A masterpiece of local history, Grand Salute ranges from the hometown roots of America's "first soldier" to the inspiring women volunteers of the Connellsville Canteen and the astonishing escape of a young girl from Nazi-occupied Europe and her new life in the United States. Presenting the men and women who won World War II in all their complexity and glory, Grand Salute pays tribute to a generation that changed the course of history as well as themselves.

This is the first full-length biography of Charles S. Johnson (1893-1956). Although he called himself a "sidelines activist," his advocacy for racial equality was never watered-down or half-hearted. His strategy was to work indirectly, sometimes behind the scenes, to influence public policy and to mobilize groups with special concerns, especially black sharecroppers.

Together with W. E. B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier he has been named as a "founding father" among contemporary black sociologists. In a coalition with an embattled band of southern white liberals he pressed the federal government to end lynching, the poll tax, "separate but equal" schooling, and other racial inequalities of the Jim Crow era.

Throughout his career Johnson played the vital role of building bridges between the races, specifically in gaining white philanthropic support in a stimulating activism in the black community. For a quarter of a century he conducted research on the South's twin system of economic and racial exploitation. Two of his books-"Shadow of the Plantation" and "Growing up in the Black Belt" (a study of black youth and its problems in the 1930s)-are recognized today as classics.

In the last ten years of his life Johnson served as the first black president of Fisk University, one of the most important of the historically black colleges.

In this volume are new poems of the American West by one of today's current masters.