Trek Across America
Author: Cindy Slovacek
Publisher: PRUFROCK PRESS INC.
Published: 2001-03
Total Pages: 86
ISBN-13: 9781883055394
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A Land So Strange
Author: Andrés Reséndez
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2009-01-06
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780465068418
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe extraordinary tale of a shipwrecked Spaniard who walked across America in the sixteenth century In 1527, a mission set out from Spain to colonize Florida. But the expedition went horribly wrong: delayed by a hurricane and knocked off course by a colossal error of navigation, the mission quickly became a desperate journey of survival. Of the three hundred men who had embarked, only four survived--three Spaniards and an African slave. This tiny band endured a horrific march through Florida, a harrowing raft passage across the Louisiana coast, and years of enslavement in the American Southwest. They journeyed for almost ten years in search of the Pacific Ocean that would guide them home, seeing lands, peoples, plants, and animals that no outsider had before. In this enthralling tale of four castaways wandering in an unknown land, Andrés Reséndez brings to life the vast, dynamic world of North America just a few years before European settlers would transform it forever.
Bold Spirit
Author: Linda Lawrence Hunt
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2007-12-18
Total Pages: 338
ISBN-13: 0307425061
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 1896, a Norwegian immigrant and mother of eight children named Helga Estby was behind on taxes and the mortgage when she learned that a mysterious sponsor would pay $10,000 to a woman who walked across America. Hoping to win the wager and save her family’s farm, Helga and her teenaged daughter Clara, armed with little more than a compass, red-pepper spray, a revolver, and Clara’s curling iron, set out on foot from Eastern Washington. Their route would pass through 14 states, but they were not allowed to carry more than five dollars each. As they visited Indian reservations, Western boomtowns, remote ranches and local civic leaders, they confronted snowstorms, hunger, thieves and mountain lions with equal aplomb. Their treacherous and inspirational journey to New York challenged contemporary notions of femininity and captured the public imagination. But their trip had such devastating consequences that the Estby women's achievement was blanketed in silence until, nearly a century later, Linda Lawrence Hunt encountered their extraordinary story.
A Walk Across America
Author: Peter Jenkins
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2001-09-18
Total Pages: 308
ISBN-13: 006095955X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTwenty-five years ago, a disillusioned young man set out on a walk across America. This is the book he wrote about that journey -- a classic account of the reawakening of his faith in himself and his country. "I started out searching for myself and my country," Peter Jenkins writes, "and found both." In this timeless classic, Jenkins describes how disillusionment with society in the 1970s drove him out onto the road on a walk across America. His experiences remain as sharp and telling today as they were twenty-five years ago -- from the timeless secrets of life, learned from a mountain-dwelling hermit, to the stir he caused by staying with a black family in North Carolina, to his hours of intense labor in Southern mills. Many, many miles later, he learned lessons about his country and himself that resonate to this day -- and will inspire a new generation to get out, hit the road and explore.
Walking to Listen
Author: Andrew Forsthoefel
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2017-03-07
Total Pages: 403
ISBN-13: 1632867001
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA memoir of one young man’s coming of age on a journey across America--told through the stories of the people of all ages, races, and inclinations he meets along the way. Life is fast, and I’ve found it’s easy to confuse the miraculous for the mundane, so I’m slowing down, way down, in order to give my full presence to the extraordinary that infuses each moment and resides in every one of us. At 23, Andrew Forsthoefel headed out the back door of his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, with a backpack, an audio recorder, his copies of Whitman and Rilke, and a sign that read "Walking to Listen." He had just graduated from Middlebury College and was ready to begin his adult life, but he didn’t know how. So he decided to take a cross-country quest for guidance, one where everyone he met would be his guide. In the year that followed, he faced an Appalachian winter and a Mojave summer. He met beasts inside: fear, loneliness, doubt. But he also encountered incredible kindness from strangers. Thousands shared their stories with him, sometimes confiding their prejudices, too. Often he didn’t know how to respond. How to find unity in diversity? How to stay connected, even as fear works to tear us apart? He listened for answers to these questions, and to the existential questions every human must face, and began to find that the answer might be in listening itself. Ultimately, it’s the stories of others living all along the roads of America that carry this journey and sing out in a hopeful, heartfelt book about how a life is made, and how our nation defines itself on the most human level.
Trekking Across America
Author: Lyell D Jr Henry
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2024
Total Pages: 279
ISBN-13: 1609389794
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"For several decades following the end of the Civil War, the most popular sport in the United States was walking. Professional pedestrians often covered 500 miles or more for up to six grueling days and nights in pursuit of large money prizes in competitions held in big-city arenas. Walking was also a favorite amateur sport; newspapers often noted a "pedestrian mania" or "walking fever" that only began to give way in the mid-1880s to fast-rising crazes for baseball, bicycling, and roller-skating. As competitive walking faded, however, another kind of walking that had also begun in the late 1860s came to full flower. Between 1890 and 1930, hundreds of men, women, even children and entire families were on the nation's roads and railroad tracks trekking between widely separated points-frequently New York and San Francisco-and sometimes moving in unusual ways, such as on roller-skates or by walking barefooted, backwards, on stilts, or while rolling a hoop. To finance their attention-seeking journeys, many sold souvenir postcards. Although they claimed various reasons for making these treks, for most the treks clearly were a means of personal expression. The public usually found these performers entertaining, but public officials and newspaper editors often denounced them as nuisances or frauds. Tapping vintage postcards and old newspaper articles, this is the first book to bring back to view this once-familiar feature of American life. Following a prologue providing background and context, five chapters address different aspects of this trekking phenomenon. In 106 illustrations and seventy-six vignettes-some poignant, many amusing, all engaging-the book provides a fair representation of the many trekkers who moved across the country during those years. An epilogue offers some final musings about those trekking performers and their place in the annals of American popular culture"--
Granny D
Author: Doris Haddock
Publisher: Villard
Published: 2001-06-12
Total Pages: 408
ISBN-13: 0375506756
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"There's a cancer, and it's killing our democracy. A poor man has to sell his soul to get elected. I cry for this country." On February 29, 2000, ninety-year-old Doris “Granny D” Haddock completed her 3,200-mile, fourteen-month walk from Los Angeles to Washington D.C. She walked through 105-degree deserts and blinding blizzards, despite arthritis and emphysema. Along her way, her remarkable speeches — rich with wisdom, love, and political insight — transformed individuals and communities and jump-started a full-blown movement. She became a national heroine. On her journey, Haddock kept a diary — tracking the progress of her walk and recalling events in her life and the insights that have given her. Granny D celebrates an exuberant life of love, activism, and adventure — from writing one-woman feminist plays in the 1930s to stopping nuclear testing near an Eskimo fishing village in 1960 to Haddock’s current crusade. Threaded throughout is the spirit of her beloved hometown of Dublin/Peterborough, New Hampshire — Thornton Wilder’s inspirations for Grovers Croner in Out Town — a quintessentially American center of New England pluck, Yankee ingenuity and can-do attitude. Told in Doris Haddock’s distinct and unforgettable voice, Granny D will move, amuse, and inspire readers of all ages with its clarion message that one person can indeed make a difference.
Prejudice Across America
Author: James Waller
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Published: 2009-09-18
Total Pages: 337
ISBN-13: 1604730307
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe experiences of a teacher and his white students on a nationwide trek toward racial understanding In 1998 James Waller took twenty-one white college students from Washington state on a month-long journey. Prejudice Across America is the record of their interaction with the American Indian, Asian American, African American, Hispanic, and Jewish experiences nationwide. Few books have so directly and humanly captured the moment when whites confront the realities of those living as a minority in America. Waller reports here on this innovative and award-winning trek. In Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Memphis, New Orleans, Birmingham, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., his students hear both the official story of prejudice and the street story from people living and dealing with racism on a daily basis. Prejudice Across America is as much the journal of these travelers and what they face as it is a sweeping, up-close survey of the nation's racial landscape. The students walk the cheerless halls of a South Side housing project in Chicago, experience the agitated aftermath of the Olympic Games in Atlanta, and attend a briefing with President Clinton's Initiative on Race. All along the way, they hold wide-ranging group discussions and experience the unpredictable adventure of traveling by train, plane, and public transit. Drawing on student journals and on interviews with community leaders and activists throughout the country, Waller paints a compelling and provocative portrait of the nation's prejudice. In addition, Prejudice Across America includes analyses of the obstacles to reconciliation in each of the cities on the tour's itinerary. As they travel, students confront the thorny issues of race in America, face down stereotypical thoughts, prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behaviors, and uncover more tough questions than easy answers. As Waller and another group of students prepare for a similar trek in 2001, Prejudice Across America will allow readers to join them in introspection and self-discovery in the urban reality of an America where diversity isn't simply a buzzword, but a way of life.
How to Walk Across America
Author: Tyler Coulson
Publisher:
Published: 2013-02-28
Total Pages: 242
ISBN-13: 9780985611934
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow to Walk Across America is the survival guide for the crazy, courageous few who want (or need) to chuck it all and walk from ocean to ocean. No nonsense. No marketing. Just lessons from the road, from people who have actually walked across America. This is the ultimate primer on mega-long distance hiking, practical advice to keep feet from failing, sanity from disintegrating, and bank accounts from disappearing, no matter how long the hike. Attorney, adventurer, and author Tyler Coulson walked across America in 2011 with his dog, Mabel. Contributor Nate Damm did it in 2011, and contributors John and Kait Seyal did it in 2012, with three therapy dogs. Coulson shares lessons that you can only learn on the road, from common sense to highway secrets. He writes with candor and humor, stripping away all the marketing and glamour of high-tech, high-dollar hiking. What's left is the ultimate first-level guide to the practice of chucking it all and walking out. It pulls no punches: it will scare you, inspire you, and leave you laughing. Tyler Coulson is also the author of BY MEN OR BY THE EARTH.
Walk of Ages
Author: Jim Reisler
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 2015-02-01
Total Pages: 234
ISBN-13: 0803290144
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOn his seventieth birthday in 1909, a slim man with a shock of white hair, a walrus mustache, and a spring in his step faced west from Park Row in Manhattan and started walking. By the time Edward Payson Weston was finished, he was in San Francisco, having trekked 3,895 miles in 104 days. Weston’s first epic walk across America transcended sport. He was “everyman” in a stirring battle against the elements and exhaustion, tramping along at the pace of someone decades younger. Having long been America’s greatest pedestrian, he was attempting the most ambitious and physically taxing walk of his career. He walked most of the way alone when the car that he hired to follow him kept breaking down, and he often had to rest without adequate food or shelter. That Weston made it is one of the truly great but forgotten sports feats of all time. Thanks in large part to his daily dispatches of his travails—from blizzards to intense heat, rutted roads, bad shoes, and illness—Weston’s trek became a wonder of the ages and attracted international headlines to the sport called “pedestrianism.” Aided by long-buried archival information, colorful biographical details, and Weston’s diary entries, Walk of Ages is more than a book about a man going for a walk. It is an epic tale of beating the odds and a penetrating look at a vanished time in America.
