New construction seems to be taking place all around. In every direction, there is another shopping center, neighborhood, or business park being built. With all the commotion and progress, it can be easy to forget what was. We tend to neglect the old, abandoned buildings around us, leaving them to decay or suffer a brutal demise by the cold, hardened steel of heavy equipment. In the world of photography, there are those who seek out these forgotten pieces of history in hopes of capturing what's left on camera, thereby preserving them in their own way. Author Sean Toler is one such photographer. Traveling the roads of Virginia, he has photographed numerous old, abandoned buildings in an effort to make them last a little longer. Knowing that some of the buildings he has photographed no longer stand, he is grateful that he was able to capture them before they disappeared from the landscape forever.

George Mason (1725-92) is often omitted from the small circle of founding fathers celebrated today, but in his service to America he was, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, "of the first order of greatness." Jeff Broadwater provides a comprehensive account of Mason's life at the center of the momentous events of eighteenth-century America. Mason played a key role in the Stamp Act Crisis, the American Revolution, and the drafting of Virginia's first state constitution. He is perhaps best known as author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, a document often hailed as the model for the Bill of Rights. As a Virginia delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Mason influenced the emerging Constitution on point after point. Yet when he was rebuffed in his efforts to add a bill of rights and concluded the document did too little to protect the interests of the South, he refused to sign the final draft. Broadwater argues that Mason's recalcitrance was not the act of an isolated dissenter; rather, it emerged from the ideology of the American Revolution. Mason's concerns about the abuse of political power, Broadwater shows, went to the essence of the American experience.

Have you ever driven past a dilapidated old building, with broken windows and covered in ivy, and wondered what happened there? How long has that building been vacant and left to be consumed by nature? This book takes you on a photo tour of such buildings in Virginia, all forgotten and falling apart. There is an Art Deco city skyscraper, which formerly held a bank, complete with a bank vault. Another property contains a sprawling complex of a former Catholic high school. Additional locations include houses, schools, commercial warehouses, and even a former outdoor Renaissance Faire. Sometimes there is available information about how these buildings became abandoned. In other cases, the story is a complete mystery. Regardless of the details, there is something intriguing about seeing a structure that has slowly decayed, a once pristine place being transformed into broken glass and crumbling ceiling tiles. The people are long gone, but you can still see what remains of something they have left behind, just waiting to be discovered with a camera.

During the late 1860s, Hispanos from Colorado's San Luis Valley moved their families east over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains into Huerfano County. Their story is an important and almost forgotten part of Colorado's history as a whole, though their contributions are still felt throughout the area today and their descendants still call this land home. In Forgotten Cucharenos of the Lower Valley, historian Virginia Sanchez brings this fascinating account of Native American, Hispano and Anglo cultures to life, presenting new information about Cucharas and the people who settled there.

In 1889, a massive storm caused a tiny creek in Virginia to turn into a raging river, and the rushing waters washed away an embankment where the railroad crossed. Eighteen souls were lost when a passenger train plunged into the washout.

Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's fourth novel, offers the reader an impression of a single June day in London in 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a Conservative member of parliament, is preparing to give an evening party, while the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith hears the birds in Regent's Park chattering in Greek. There seems to be nothing, except perhaps London, to link Clarissa and Septimus. She is middle-aged and prosperous, with a sheltered happy life behind her; Smith is young, poor, and driven to hatred of himself and the whole human race. Yet both share a terror of existence, and sense the pull of death. The world of Mrs Dalloway is evoked in Woolf's famous stream of consciousness style, in a lyrical and haunting language which has made this, from its publication in 1925, one of her most popular novels.

Examining the lives of individuals - freedmen, planters, and merchants - Willis explores the reciprocal interests of former slaves and former slaveholders. He shows how, in a cruel irony replicated in other areas of the South, the backbreaking work that African Americans did to clear, settle, and farm the land away from the river made the land ultimately too valuable for them to retain.