When Robert Hine's daughter, Elene, first showed signs of unhappiness as a little girl, no one dreamed she would grow up to have a serious personality disorder. As an early "baby boomer," Elene reached adolescence and young womanhood in the midst of the counterculture years. Her father, a respected professor of American history at the University of California, shares the story of his family's struggle to keep Elene on track and functional, to see her through her troubles with delusions, medication, and eventually to help her raise her own children.

Candid in its portrayal of the suffering Elene and her parents endured and the stumbling efforts of doctors and hospitals, Hine's story is also generous and inspiring. In spite of unimaginable difficulties, Elene and her father preserved their relationship and survived.

"My daughter has given me permission to go ahead with the effort, �but� I know she would react quite differently to many of the events. Where I felt sadness and dejection, she very likely felt release and exultation. Where I felt helplessness, she very likely felt in happy control. Where I saw confusion and delusion, she may well have seen purpose and steadiness. This is not the story she would tell. It is solely mine, solely the viewpoint of one man, solely a father's feelings about his daughter."--from Robert Hine's Preface to "Broken Glass"

When it was first published under the title, Edward Kern and American Expansion, Ray Allen Billington called this book ""one of the most readable, pleasant, exciting books about the West that I have ever known,"" and Allen Nevins called it ""a contribution of the first importance to Western History."" This absorbing account has become a classic, indispensable to understanding America's inexorable drive westward to the Pacific - and beyond. This second edition provides a new preface, additional maps and illustrations, and a revised bibliographical essay. In 1845, Edward Meyer Kern, a native Philadelphia and a promising young painter, joined John Charles Fremont on his Third Expedition to the West. Kern would serve as the famed explorer's artist, topographer, and cartographer. On the arduous journey through Nevada to Monterey, he mapped routes that the settlers would follow west. When the expedition became embroiled in the struggle for California and the United States went to war against Mexico, Kern was placed in command of Fort Sutter. Through all the turmoil, he continued to paint, producing remarkable scenes of America's western territories. Kern persuaded his brothers Benjamin and Richard to join him on Fremont's disastrous Fourth Expedition to seek a railroad route to the Pacific. Later Edward served in the U.S. Navy on the Ringgold-Rodgers and Brooke expeditions to Japan, Siberia, and various Pacific islands and helped prepare the first accurate charts of the sealanes to China. His enthusiasm, dedication, and skill with pen and brush helped Kern elevate the art of American exploration.

Robert Hine knew he was going blind. Yet he finished graduate school, became a history professor, and wrote books about the American West. Then, nearly fifty, Hine lost his vision completely. Fifteen years later, a risky operation restored partial vision, returning Hine to the world of the sighted. 'The trauma seemed instructive enough' for him to begin a journal. That journal is the heart of Second Sight, a sensitively written account of Hine's journey into darkness and out again.

Behind the commune movement today lies an impulse for a simpler, less harried existence that has its roots deep in American history. During the last hundred years, California has contributed to the Utopian heritage more colonies than any other American state. From varied backgrounds—religious, secular, co-operative, socialistic, Theosophical, Marxian—each new society experimented with marriage, the raising of children, education, work, religion, or government.