Traces American history between 1816 and 1865. Includes the beginnings of political division and the origins and battles of the Civil War.

Photojournalists are trained to scout important events, capture mood and emotion, predict peak action, and create images that, in an instant, tell a compelling and memorable story. In this book, award-winning photojournalist Paula Ferazzi Swift (from Framingham, MA) shows readers how she adapted her photojournalistic approach to create a thriving family portrait business. In an increasingly competitive market, professional portrait photographers need to hone their skills to capture heirloom-quality images that are a step above the rest. With the tips in this book, readers will learn how to use — or cultivate — a photojournalist’s precision capture skills to chronicle family moments that matter. Ferazzi Swift offers ideas for creating a strong and lasting client connection, eliciting memorable moments, finding storytelling locations, inspiring natural action and reactions, and capturing the inter-relationships between siblings and between children and their parents. Armed with the skills in this book, photographers will be able to capture more genuine, charming, memorable, and expressive portraits that truly depict the family’s interests, the subject’s personalities, milestone moments, meaningful locations, and the unique bond the family shares.

Accelerated Strategy Development and Execution The company of today has its supply chains and finances stretched further around the globe than ever before while simultaneously having increasing pressures to drive value across a complicated and fluid set of metrics and deliver innovations, products, and services more quickly and reliably. The competitive advantage belongs to the companies that can quicken their vision-building and strategy-execution efforts—the ones that can identify challenges more swiftly and accelerate their decision making so they are better able to formulate and deploy responses decisively yet with greater agility. To successfully accomplish this, companies will have to prioritize creating a culture of leadership that strengthens communication skills and emphasizes systems thinking by building capacity and capability that cuts across the business smokestacks and permeates the entire organization. In State of Readiness, Joseph F. Paris Jr. shares over thirty years of international business and operations experience and guides C-suite executives and business-operations and -improvement specialists on a path toward operational excellence, the organizational capability and situational awareness that is attained as the enterprise reaches a state of alignment for pursuing its strategies. In doing so, create a corporate culture that is committed to the continuous and deliberate improvement of company performance and the circumstances of those who work there—a precursor to becoming a high-performance organization.