From unsolved murders and ghastly disasters to medicinal water and sports legends, Northwestern Pennsylvania has a rich and diverse history. Titusville native John Heisman shaped football into the recognizable sport that it is today, and his namesake is honored on the Heisman Trophy. Girard's Charlotte and Libbie Battles broke glass ceilings by becoming early female titans of business and banking in the region. Marx Toys in Erie County found success in crafting affordable popular toys for the masses and became the largest toy company in the world. The horrific Ashtabula train disaster of 1876 was the worst train incident in history to that point, with more than ninety lives lost. Join author Jessica Hilburn as she reveals the shrouded history of Northwestern Pennsylvania.

Picturesque Ashtabula County harbors a rich and sometimes strange history. Ohio's Western Reserve settlers were astonished by the ancient graveyards they found that yielded bones belonging to a gigantic race. Mr. Buck of Conneaut lived a secluded life married to himself, assuming the character and dress of the fictional Mrs. Buck. A legend persists to this day that the ship of a Spanish princess lies at the bottom of Pymatuning Lake. Author Carl E. Feather delves into the rich history of Ohio's largest county and uncovers its little-known secrets in the most unexpected places.

The obscure people and events that helped make the Garden State the place it is today—from ghosts to governors, battles to boardwalk attractions. Explore the lesser-known stories that make up New Jersey’s compelling hidden history. Uncover the meaning of “Jersey Blues,” celebrate some of the state’s bravest Revolutionary and Civil War soldiers, and investigate Jersey City’s most infamous ghost. From the inferno that engulfed Asbury Park to the benevolent side of Frank Hague to the equestrienne who plunged forty feet into a pool of water on horseback in Atlantic City, rediscover these and many other events from New Jersey’s storied past. Includes photos!

Public libraries can increase their impact on knowledge development, innovation, and social change by promoting parent and family engagement in children's learning. Libraries are increasingly focusing on families. Educational research confirms that family engagement in children's learning and development predicts school readiness, positive social behaviors, high school graduation, interest in STEM careers, and post-secondary education. A Librarian's Guide to Engaging Families in Learning will inspire libraries and librarians to innovate and promote family learning from a child's earliest years through adolescence. By bringing together research and practice, it will deepen librarians' understanding of families' role in education and help them to learn new ways to build positive and trusting family partnerships that honor diverse cultures and languages, as well as to develop leadership for community impact. Written by thought leaders in the fields of family engagement and library science, each of the three main sections of the book begins with a framework followed by case studies illustrating key concepts of the framework. Cases are followed by reflections from practicing librarians. All chapters focus on practical family engagement in the social infrastructure, lifelong learning, and diversity and social justice.

In 1927, Oxford University Press published the first western-language translation of a collection of Tibetan funerary texts (the Great Liberation upon Hearing in the Bardo) under the title The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Since that time, the work has established a powerful hold on the western popular imagination, and is now considered a classic of spiritual literature. Over the years, The Tibetan Book of the Dead has inspired numerous commentaries, an illustrated edition, a play, a video series, and even an opera. Translators, scholars, and popular devotees of the book have claimed to explain its esoteric ideas and reveal its hidden meaning. Few, however, have uttered a word about its history. Bryan J. Cuevas seeks to fill this gap in our knowledge by offering the first comprehensive historical study of the Great Liberation upon Hearing in the Bardo, and by grounding it firmly in the context of Tibetan history and culture. He begins by discussing the many ways the texts have been understood (and misunderstood) by westerners, beginning with its first editor, the Oxford-educated anthropologist Walter Y. Evans-Wentz, and continuing through the present day. The remarkable fame of the book in the west, Cuevas argues, is strikingly disproportionate to how the original Tibetan texts were perceived in their own country. Cuevas tells the story of how The Tibetan Book of the Dead was compiled in Tibet, of the lives of those who preserved and transmitted it, and explores the history of the rituals through which the life of the dead is imagined in Tibetan society. This book provides not only a fascinating look at a popular and enduring spiritual work, but also a much-needed corrective to the proliferation of ahistorical scholarship surrounding The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

"Penningroth's conclusions emerge from an epic research agenda.... Before the Movement presents an original and provocative account of how civil law was experienced by Black citizens and how their 'legal lives' changed over time . . . [an] ambitious, stimulating, and provocative book." —Eric Foner, New York Review of Books Shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize Winner of the Merle Curti Social History Award from the Organization of American Historians Winner of the Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians Winner of the David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Legal History Winner of the James Willard Hurst Prize Winner of the Scribes Book Award (American Society of Legal Writers) A prize-winning scholar draws on astonishing new research to demonstrate how Black people used the law to their advantage long before the Civil Rights Movement. The familiar story of civil rights goes like this: once, America’s legal system shut Black people out and refused to recognize their rights, their basic human dignity, or even their very lives. When lynch mobs gathered, police and judges often closed their eyes, if they didn’t join in. For Black people, law was a hostile, fearsome power to be avoided whenever possible. Then, starting in the 1940s, a few brave lawyers ventured south, bent on changing the law. Soon, ordinary African Americans, awakened by Supreme Court victories and galvanized by racial justice activists, launched the civil rights movement. In Before the Movement, acclaimed historian Dylan C. Penningroth brilliantly revises the conventional story. Drawing on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses across the nation, Penningroth reveals that African Americans, far from being ignorant about law until the middle of the twentieth century, have thought about, talked about, and used it going as far back as even the era of slavery. They dealt constantly with the laws of property, contract, inheritance, marriage and divorce, of associations (like churches and businesses and activist groups), and more. By exercising these “rights of everyday use,” Penningroth demonstrates, they made Black rights seem unremarkable. And in innumerable subtle ways, they helped shape the law itself—the laws all of us live under today. Penningroth’s narrative, which stretches from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s, partly traces the history of his own family. Challenging accepted understandings of Black history framed by relations with white people, he puts Black people at the center of the story—their loves and anger and loneliness, their efforts to stay afloat, their mistakes and embarrassments, their fights, their ideas, their hopes and disappointments, in all their messy humanness. Before the Movement is an account of Black legal lives that looks beyond the Constitution and the criminal justice system to recover a rich, broader vision of Black life—a vision allied with, yet distinct from, “the freedom struggle.”