Faith is neither static nor instantaneous. It is not something we stumble upon and instantly understand. Neither is it a monolithic, one-dimensional, singular entity that has but one face, one color, one fragrance. It is many-faceted, multi-dimensional, and appears differently depending on one's angle to the Son. In Finding Faith in Slow Motion, Damon Gray examines faith from myriad angles and through gut-wrenching life experiences, as he asks regarding faith, "What is that stuff?" Spanning the emotional gamut from laughter to tears, Gray challenges us to define our faith and redefine it, to look at it from a multitude of perspectives and define it again. The writing is intentionally evocative and playful, offering the reader the ability to identify with Gray as he wrestles with the weighty subject matter of finding faith.
The Dixie frontier was one of the most romantic and heroic of the entire North American continent. This engaging social history of the everyday life of the first settlers and pioneers has earned readers' praise over two generations.
The American Midwest is an orphan among regions. In comparison to the South, the far West, and New England, its history has been sadly neglected. To spark more attention to their region, midwestern historians will need to explain the Midwest’s crucial roles in the development of the entire country: it helped spark the American Revolution and stabilized the young American republic by strengthening its economy and endowing it with an agricultural heartland; it played a critical role in the Union victory in the Civil War; it extended the republican institutions created by the American founders, and then its settler populism made those institutions more democratic; it weakened and decentered the cultural dominance of the urban East; and its bustling land markets deepened Americans’ embrace of capitalist institutions and attitudes. In addition to outlining the centrality of the Midwest to crucial moments in American history, Jon K. Lauck resurrects the long-forgotten stories of the institutions founded by an earlier generation of midwestern historians, from state historical societies to the Mississippi Valley Historical Association. Their strong commitment to local and regional communities rooted their work in place and gave it an audience outside the academy. He also explores the works of these scholars, showing that they researched a broad range of themes and topics, often pioneering fields that remain vital today. The Lost Region demonstrates the importance of the Midwest, the depth of historical work once written about the region, the continuing insights that can be gleaned from this body of knowledge, and the lessons that can be learned from some of its prominent historians, all with the intent of once again finding the forgotten center of the nation and developing a robust historiography of the Midwest.
Mabel Agnes Elliott: Pioneering Feminist, Pacifist Sociologist provides a history of the life and career of the late Mabel Agnes Elliott (1898-1990), a pioneering female sociologist largely forgotten despite her achievements and contributions. A native of Iowa, Elliott earned three degrees in Sociology from Northwestern University. In addition to her career as a sociologist, she was a feminist and a pacifist whose occasional criticism of criminal policies in the United States led to the creation of an FBI file. Despite being largely disregarded by her male colleagues, Elliott wrote a wildly successful textbook, Social Disorganization, that published four editions over thirty years. After starting her career at the University of Kansas and working there for twenty years, she moved to Chatham College in Pennsylvania in 1949 where she was appreciated for her singular abilities. Among her many achievements, she was the first nwoman to be elected Presidet of the Society for the Study of Social Problems in 1957.
So many books about the American West leave out the more intriguing details: When, in 1803, the young USA doubled its size with the purchase from France of an unexplored vastness called La Louisiane, it was a British bank which lent the Americans most of the $15 million that they didn't have. So the financial papers for the biggest real-estate deal in history are, to this day, held in a London vault. Not many people know that… If his ranching uncle-by-marriage had had his way, the teenaged Winston Churchill – a disappointing scholar – might have been sent west to Wyoming to train as a cowboy. Who knows but, in time, he himself might have become a rancher. How then would history have turned out? Another ranching Englishman played a key role in recruiting a small army of Texas gunmen to “invade” northern Wyoming and kill more than 40 small settlers, men who had too easily been accused of being rustlers. The plan went badly wrong. But the Englishman had slipped away – gone home on holiday… It seems unlikely that Butch Cassidy was killed in a Bolivian shoot-out. It seems that he returned, under a false name, to live out his days in the West. In 1935, he even submitted a autobiographical script to Hollywood – only to have it rejected as being “too preposterous to be believable”. He died two years later – penniless. “Royal tourist visits the Colonies” was the local headline. In her VC-10, the Queen had flown into the small town of Sheridan in Wyoming. First, she took an extended walkabout along Main Street and then she holidayed for several days on a friend's ranch in the shadow of the Big Horn Mountain … Tim Slessor, a one-time BBC producer, has filmed “out West” for nearly 50 years. In this book, he picks out a selection of fascinating stories that range from the mountain men and their fur trade to the pioneers of the overland trail, from Custer and the disaster at the Little Big Horn to the last stand of the Sioux at Wounded Knee, from the early cow-towns and the railroads to the cattle barons and the emigrant sod-busters.
From the time of Coronado?s discovery to the era of modern ski resorts and sport climbing routes, adventurers have been lured irresistibly to the Rocky Mountains. In this book distinguished writer David Lavender traces the colorful history of the Rockies, focusing on the period that began in 1859 with the first gold strikes. The real and fabled attractions of gold, silver, furs, lumber, and lead brought swarms of people into the mountains, eagerly seeking wealth. A get-rich-quick spirit pervaded the Rockies, leading to lawlessness, violence, vigilantism, and political expediency. The Rockies is particularly revealing about the struggles which resulted in codes peculiar to the mountainous West. Duane A. Smith provides a new introduction to this Bison Books edition of The Rockies.
