Even though the harsh winters of western Ireland keep visitors away from Brianna's bed-and-breakfast inn, she expects Grayson Thane, a successful American mystery author, who plans to spend the winter alone writing his new novel. But sometimes fate has a plan of its own. Sometimes fire can be born in ice. The second installment of Roberts's Irish trilogy featuring the Concannon sisters.

(From the Preface) Traces in the Dust focuses upon the African American families and residents of Carbondale since the founding of the Carbondale Township (1852). It is meant to provide a glimpse of the growth, progress, and development of the Black American community in the city through the exploration of recorded data and oral history.

Chartered in 1869, Southern Illinois University has been a stalwart presence on the southern Illinois landscape for a century and a half. This book celebrates the 150th anniversary of the university’s founding by exploring in depth its history since 1969, when the last book to celebrate a major anniversary was published. Chapters reflect on SIU’s successful athletics program, the various colleges and departments within the university, the diverse holdings and collections of the library, the unique innovative research enterprises, and special programs such as the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute and Touch of Nature Environmental Center. Although SIU may be a typical large public university in many ways, its unique location, history, and culture have made it a distinct institution of higher education. Located close to the Shawnee National Forest and Giant City State Park, the landscape is an indelible part of SIU, contributing to both the beauty of the university grounds and the campus culture. The university’s sesquicentennial provides a wonderful opportunity to revisit all that makes SIU amazing. Illustrated with 306 photographs of theater and music performances, art, sports, past and present students, faculty, staff, administration, politicians, community members, successful alums, distinguished visitors, and patrons of the university buildings, and landscapes, Southern Illinois University at 150 Years captures the university’s story in all its vivid color.

Maycock has traced the architectural history of Carbondale from its founding in 1852 to just prior to World War II. Like numerous other midwestern towns established along recently constructed railroads, Carbondale emerged essentially because of the newlychartered Illinois Central Railroad. The rail­road provided economic stimulus, but the personal involvement and commitment of Carbondale's citizens also proved major fac­tors in the town's architectural development. Architecturally, Carbondale followed the fashions of the times, with some local varia­tions, although like many small towns it was from 10 to 20years behind major metro­politan areas. With the exception of the uni­versity buildings, structures in Carbondale were designed and erected not by trained ar­chitects but by "local carpenters and owners who had seen buildings elsewhere or read about them in periodicals and architectural pattern books of the period." These build­ings "serve as direct reflections of the com­munity's progress at various points in its history." The present study covers 130years and digs into the roots of a typical 19th-century railroad town in Illinois. The book concen­trates on the older section of town, that which existed before the "skyrocketing en­rollments at Southern Illinois University put unforeseen pressures on the town, causing widespread demolition and alteration of older buildings to accommodate the sudden increase in population." Although Carbondale today is totally dif­ferent from the settlement laid out by Daniel Brush, the city did spring from the roots Maycock describes. Maycock gives the reader ample opportunity to compare Car­bondale then and now. About half of her 138photographs show historic Carbondale, half the contemporary city. She includes a map of early Carbondale to enable the reader to match the city as it was against the Carbondale of today. Included also is a map of rail lines, showing cities and towns along the Illi­nois Central that came into being for the same reason Carbondale did.

Dispossessing : land and past -- Squaring the circles, filling the squares -- Settlers and transients -- Civil wars and silences -- Gilding the past -- Passersby, rich and penniless -- Reconstruction and race.

In the pre-Civil War and Civil War periods the Illinois black code deprived blacks of suffrage and court rights, and the Illinois Free Schools Act kept most black children out of public schooling. But, as McCaul documents, they did not sit idly by. They applied the concepts of “bargaining power” (rewarding, punishing, and dialectical) and the American ideal of “community” to participate in winning two major victories during this era. By the use of dialectical power, exerted mainly via John Jones’ tract, The Black Laws of Illinois, they helped secure the repeal of the state’s black code; by means of punishing power, mainly through boycotts and ‘‘invasions,’’ they exerted pressures that brought a cancellation of the Chicago public school policy of racial segregation. McCaul makes clear that the blacks’ struggle for school rights is but one of a number of such struggles waged by disadvantaged groups (women, senior citizens, ethnics, and immigrants). He postulates a “stage’’ pattern for the history of the black struggle—a pattern of efforts by federal and state courts to change laws and constitutions, followed by efforts to entice, force, or persuade local authorities to comply with the laws and constitutional articles and with the decrees of the courts.

Established in 1911, The Rotarian is the official magazine of Rotary International and is circulated worldwide. Each issue contains feature articles, columns, and departments about, or of interest to, Rotarians. Seventeen Nobel Prize winners and 19 Pulitzer Prize winners – from Mahatma Ghandi to Kurt Vonnegut Jr. – have written for the magazine.