Have you ever desired to escape and live simply? Have you ever fantasized about moving to a small town? Having spent half of my forty-three year career as a high school principal and volunteer pastor in small towns and counties with less than five thousand people, I learned that bliss was superficial. No matter how positive, people resisted change, especially with a newcomer serving as the agent of change. Kinfolk mattered more than issues. To survive, newcomers walked a fine line and had to learn who controlled and who was related to whom. Relationships mattered more than issues. Good versus evil became obvious. In Freedom's Tree, Rock Creek Valley resembled Canaanite cities with heavily fortified bulwarks. Interstate highway construction had decimated the economy and school reorganization altered valley culture. Perceived as invaders, newcomers arrived in Rock Creek at God's direction, while a murderer escaped detection and residents presumed another's guilt.

The Congressional Record is the official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress. It is published daily when Congress is in session. The Congressional Record began publication in 1873. Debates for sessions prior to 1873 are recorded in The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States (1789-1824), the Register of Debates in Congress (1824-1837), and the Congressional Globe (1833-1873)

A Newbery Honor Book: During the Revolutionary War, a courageous pioneer girl fights for freedom When thirteen-year-old Stephanie Venable moves with her family from North Carolina to a four-hundred-acre homestead in Kentucky, she knows they’re in for a great adventure. The family sells whatever belongings they can’t fit in their covered wagon, and begin the long journey west. But Stephanie has brought something special with her, an apple seed from their tree back home, just as her grandmother did when she moved from France to America. In Kentucky, the Venables must fell trees, build a cabin, and prepare the land for crops. Being a pioneer is a lot of work, but it’s also very exciting: Stephanie and her family must grow, catch, or hunt everything they need to eat and survive. With the Revolutionary War also moving west, the family faces threats from British sympathizers and American rebels. Will freedom take root in America, like Stephanie’s young apple tree, or will the Venable family succumb to the hardships of frontier life?

The bestselling author of "Washington's Crossing" and "Albion's Seed" offers a strikingly original history of America's founding principles. Fischer examines liberty and freedom not as philosophical or political abstractions, but as folkways and popular beliefs deeply embedded in American culture. 400+ illustrations, 250 in full color.

This book describes the important ideas in a variety of fields such as medicine, biology, finance, and marketing in a common conceptual framework. While the approach is statistical, the emphasis is on concepts rather than mathematics. Many examples are given, with a liberal use of colour graphics. It is a valuable resource for statisticians and anyone interested in data mining in science or industry. The book's coverage is broad, from supervised learning (prediction) to unsupervised learning. The many topics include neural networks, support vector machines, classification trees and boosting---the first comprehensive treatment of this topic in any book. This major new edition features many topics not covered in the original, including graphical models, random forests, ensemble methods, least angle regression & path algorithms for the lasso, non-negative matrix factorisation, and spectral clustering. There is also a chapter on methods for "wide'' data (p bigger than n), including multiple testing and false discovery rates.

The great-granddaughters of a freeborn Cherokee woman named Malindy, who was unlawfully enslaved as a child by a Missouri, farmer and gave birth to five children in slavery in the 1800s, share the story of their ancestor--a story of courage, conviction, and love.