No one is more surprised than Sunny Licht when Noah Whitmore proposes. She's a scarlet woman and an unwed mother—an outcast even in her small Quaker community. But she can't resist Noah's offer of a fresh start in a place where her scandalous past is unknown. In Sunny, the former Union soldier sees a woman whose loneliness matches his own. When they arrive in Wisconsin, he'll see that she and her baby daughter want for nothing…except the love that war burned out of him. Yet Sunny makes him hope once more—for the home they're building, and the family he never hoped to find.
Four men brave the western frontier, putting their lives on the line to develop new land...and new love. Gideon Scott, adrift from home, rides the range of emotions...can he ever be worthy of the woman he adores? Range-riding preacher Joel Scott searches for his lost father...will he also find hope for his heart? Smokey Travis wants a woman to ride into the sunset with...but is Columbine more interested in escape than marriage? Andy Cullen is saddled with concern for Linnet, who lives under a death sentence...will wild horses drag him away from her side? Can each man find his true worth? Will renewed faith be the trail that leads to his bride?
Hannah Forrester's Life Did Not Belong To Her A contract of indenture saw to that. But no one owned her soul, and Ethan Reed knew instinctively that she was the one woman who belonged by his side, for now and forever. Rugged as the frontier he roamed, Ethan had left his mark on Hannah's heart.
Complete with actual advertisements from both women seeking husbands and males seeking brides, Hearts West includes twelve stories of courageous mail order brides and their exploits. Some were fortunate enough to marry good men and live happily ever after; still others found themselves in desperate situations that robbed them of their youth and sometimes their lives. Desperate to strike it rich during the Gold Rush, men sacrificed many creature comforts. Only after they arrived did some of them realize how much they missed female companionship. One way for men living on the frontier to meet women was through subscriptions to heart-and-hand clubs. The men received newspapers with information, and sometimes photographs, about women, with whom they corresponded. Eventually, a man might convince a woman to join him in the West, and in matrimony. Social status, political connections, money, companionship, or security were often considered more than love in these arrangements.
If countless books and movies are to be believed, America's Wild West was, at heart, a world of cowboys and Indians, sheriffs and gunslingers, scruffy settlers and mountain men—a man's world. Here, Chris Enss, in the latest of her popular books to take on this stereotype, tells the stories of twelve courageous women who faced down schoolrooms full of children on the open prairies and in the mining towns of the Old West. Now with five new teachers covered and a new chapter, the second edition of Frontier Teachers brings these important stories to light. Between 1847 and 1858, more than 600 women teachers traveled across the untamed frontier to provide youngsters with an education, and the numbers grew rapidly in the decades to come, as women took advantage of one of the few career opportunities for respectable work for ladies of the era. Enduring hardship, the dozen women whose stories are movingly told in the pages of Frontier Teachers demonstrated the utmost dedication and sacrifice necessary to bring formal education to the Wild West. As immortalized in works of art and literature, for many students their women teachers were heroic figures who introduced them to a world of possibilities—and changed America forever.
When a man comes west, he puts his life on the line to develop a new land; range-riding preacher Joel Scott rides many trails in search of his father and wonders if renewed faith will be the trail that leads to his bride.
From the author of The Agitators, the acclaimed and captivating true story of two restless society girls who left their affluent lives to “rough it” as teachers in the wilds of Colorado in 1916. In the summer of 1916, Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood, bored by society luncheons, charity work, and the effete men who courted them, left their families in Auburn, New York, to teach school in the wilds of northwestern Colorado. They lived with a family of homesteaders in the Elkhead Mountains and rode to school on horseback, often in blinding blizzards. Their students walked or skied, in tattered clothes and shoes tied together with string. The young cattle rancher who had lured them west, Ferry Carpenter, had promised them the adventure of a lifetime. He hadn’t let on that they would be considered dazzling prospective brides for the locals. Nearly a hundred years later, Dorothy Wickenden, the granddaughter of Dorothy Woodruff, found the teachers’ buoyant letters home, which captured the voices of the pioneer women, the children, and other unforgettable people the women got to know. In reconstructing their journey, Wickenden has created an exhilarating saga about two intrepid women and the “settling up” of the West.
The Westward Expansion Was A Time Of radical change in America. The upheaval of moving west and beginning a new life from scratch was difficult for those who made the trip. "Except for love..." said Isabella Bird of Colorado in 1873, "this is a wretched existence." In spite of the rough conditions and frequent shortages of suitable partners in the West, the pioneers met, fell in love and married, but were forced to adapt their courting to a frontier life. The civilized comforts and proprieties of the East yielded to many new ways of finding a mate, from personal ads to rental brides. The West was not all wild, however: Religion still played a strong role in western life, whether lovers were Mormon, Catholic, Baptist or Buddhist; and the traditions of immigrants from Europe, Asia and the Americas all helped to form courtship and marriage rituals on the frontier. Through period photographs, extracts from journals and letters and reminiscences, Cathy Luchetti's subjects tell the true story of romantic life on the American frontier, reminding us of what it was like to fall in love then -- and now. "I sat there in the dark waiting. I had waited only a few minutes. when I heard the longed-for footsteps come to my gate. I went to meet him and would have thrown my arms around him, dust covered and dirty as he was, but he would not allow it. He caught me by the arms, and with he on one side of the low fence and I on the other, he delivered a tirade of accusations and abuse.... "Then he put his hand on my face, pressing gently, and said, 'Now, old lady, if you're going to marry me you've got to say so right now, and we'll get married and camp under a tree, for I haven't a damn cent.What d'ya say?' "I had been waiting all this time for the tirade to be over so I could say yes. Now I said it. "'Good God, old lady! Do you mean it?' And it didn't take him long to jump that low fence. He didn't even stop to open the gate. Then our arms went around each other in one long embrace." -- Sarah Olds "And so I told her girl, that I would come the next Thursday, and bring a horse, bridle, and saddle for her, and she must be ready to go. Her mother declared I shouldn't have her; but I know'd I should, if somebody else didn't get her before Thursday." -- David Crockett
John A. Caruso’s The Appalachian Frontier is a stirring drama of the beginnings of American westward expansion. It traces the advance of the frontier in the area between the Ohio and Tennessee rivers and the development of the American character—those attitudes toward personal liberty and dignity that have come to epitomize our national ideal. The Appalachian Frontier is no mere catalog of facts; it is a recreation of life. Not until about 1650, more than a generation after the first English settlements were established on the eastern coast, did organized bands of white explorers, hunters and fur trappers venture very far into the trackless back country claimed by the British Crown. Beginning with those earliest scouting parties The Appalachian Frontier presses with the pioneers past the Fall Line and the pine barrens into the Piedmont of Virginia, on through gaps in the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Great Valley of the Appalachians, through the Great Valley to the jagged peaks of the Allegheny Front and, finally, over those peaks into the rich country of Kentucky and Tennessee. As the frontiersman advances he discovers that the rules prevailing in the European-dominated eastern settlements do not apply in his new situation. Thus we see him formulate the rudiments of a law of his own. As his life grows more complex, he frames compacts and, finally; constitutions peculiarly adapted to the exigencies of frontier living. We are present at the inception of the fluid democracy that later engulfed the more stable coastal colonies and ultimately came to characterize the government of the United States. The story closes, quite properly, with the admission of Tennessee into the Union in 1796. In John A. Caruso’s bright, informal, sometimes almost racy telling of the tale, historical personages emerge as real people whose triumphs and heartaches we share, with whose deficiencies and inadequacies we sympathize, and in whose hours of nobility we rejoice.
Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines investigates the political and cultural significance of marriages and other sexual encounters between Christians and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula, from the Islamic conquest in the early eighth century to the end of Muslim rule in 1492. Interfaith liaisons carried powerful resonances, as such unions could function as a tool of diplomacy, the catalyst for conversion, or potent psychological propaganda. Examining a wide range of source material including legal documents, historical narratives, polemical and hagiographic works, poetry, music, and visual art, Simon Barton presents a nuanced reading of the ways interfaith couplings were perceived, tolerated, or feared, depending upon the precise political and social contexts in which they occurred. Religious boundaries in the Peninsula were complex and actively policed, often shaped by an overriding fear of excessive social interaction or assimilation of the three faiths that coexisted within the region. Barton traces the protective cultural, legal, and mental boundaries that the rival faiths of Iberia erected, and the processes by which women, as legitimate wives or slave concubines, physically traversed those borders. Through a close examination of the realities and the imagination of interfaith relations, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines highlights the extent to which sex, power, and identity were closely bound up with one another.
