In 1884, when Laura, Manly, and their daughter Rose come from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri, looking for a better life, Laura's outspoken articles against a local timberman cause some problems.

The range of Walt Disney's accomplishments is remarkable. He is considered the most successful filmmaker in history. He won 32 Academy Awards, far more than those of any other filmmaker. He revolutionized the amusement park and resort industries, and his theme parks have been praised as among the most outstanding urban designs in the United States. As Ward Kimball, one of Walt Disney's most prominent animators, once said, "At the bottom line Walt was a down-to-earth farmer's son who just happened to be a genius." Walt Disney spent his formative years in Missouri. Some of the direct influences of these years on his career are documented in this book. "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," the first feature-length animated film to be produced, was inspired by a black-and-white, live-action silent film version of "Snow White" that he viewed as a teen-ager in Kansas City. A theatrical production of "Peter Pan" that he saw as a child in Marceline, Mo., led to his own animated version of the story. Born in Chicago in December 1901, he moved with his family to a farm near Marceline, where he lived from ages 4 to 9. "To tell the truth," Walt Disney once wrote, "more things of importance happened to me in Marceline than have happened since--or are likely to in the future." The town of Marceline was the inspiration for many features of future Disney theme parks, and the pastoral setting he lived in there is also reflected in many of his films. Except for a couple of years spent in Chicago and France, Disney lived in Kansas City from 1911 to 1923. During his years in Kansas City he learned the discipline that would enable him to persevere and prevail through the many hardships he experienced as a struggling filmmaker. It was in Kansas City that he trained to become a commercial artist and an animator, and Kansas City was the location of his first film production studio, Laugh-O-gram Films. Walt Disney's Missouri not only tells the story of the young Disney growing up, but it also paints a picture of the Kansas City he knew. With the bankruptcy of Laugh-O-gram Films, Disney moved to California, drawing with him many of his Kansas City colleagues, who would eventually win fame in animation themselves. This richly illustrated book describes Disney's Missouri years and chronicles his many connections and returns to the state until his death in 1966. The book also details two little-know projects in Missouri that Disney seriously considered in his later years--theme parks in his "hometown," Marceline, and in St. Louis. As his daughter Diane Disney Miller says in the foreword to the book, Walt Disney was "truly a Missourian."

From acclaimed novelist Jonis Agee, whom The New York Times Book Review called “a gifted poet of that dark lushness in the heart of the American landscape,” The River Wife is a sweeping, panoramic story that ranges from the New Madrid earthquake of 1811 through the Civil War to the bootlegging days of the 1930s. When the earthquake brings Annie Lark’s Missouri house down on top of her, she finds herself pinned under the massive roof beam, facing certain death. Rescued by French fur trapper Jacques Ducharme, Annie learns to love the strong, brooding man and resolves to live out her days as his “River Wife.” More than a century later, in 1930, Hedie Rails comes to Jacques’ Landing to marry Clement Ducharme, a direct descendant of the fur trapper and river pirate, and the young couple begin their life together in the very house Jacques built for Annie so long ago. When, night after late night, mysterious phone calls take Clement from their home, a pregnant Hedie finds comfort in Annie’s leather-bound journals. But as she reads of the sinister dealings and horrendous misunderstandings that spelled out tragedy for the rescued bride, Hedie fears that her own life is paralleling Annie’s, and that history is repeating itself with Jacques’ kin. Among the family’s papers, Hedie encounters three other strong-willed women who helped shape Jacques Ducharme’s life–Omah, the freed slave who took her place beside him as a river raider; his second wife, Laura, who loved money more than the man she married; and Laura and Jacques’ daughter, Maddie, a fiery beauty with a nearly uncontrollable appetite for love. Their stories, together with Annie’s, weave a haunting tale of this mysterious, seductive, and ultimately dangerous man, a man whose hand stretched over generations of women at a bend in the river where fate and desire collide. The River Wife richly evokes the nineteenth-century South at a time when lives changed with the turn of a card or the flash of a knife. Jonis Agee vividly portrays a lineage of love and heartbreak, passion and deceit, as each river wife comes to discover that blind devotion cannot keep the truth at bay, nor the past from haunting the present.

Each fun and intriguing volume in the award-winning series offers more than 250 illustrated pages of places where tourists usually don't venture: the oddball curiosities, ghostly sites, local legends, crazy characters, cursed roads, and peculiar roadside attractions.