Nearly 250 years after ninety-five-year-old Elder Thomas Faunce got caught up in the mythmaking around Plymouth Rock, his great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter Hilda Faunce Wetherill died in Pacific Grove, California, leaving behind a cache of letters and family papers. The remarkable story they told prompted historian Lynne Marie Getz to search out related collections and archives—and from these to assemble a family chronology documenting three generations of American life. Abolitionists, Doctors, Ranchers, and Writers tells of zealous abolitionists and free-state campaigners aiding and abetting John Brown in Bleeding Kansas; of a Civil War soldier serving as a provost marshal in an occupied Arkansas town; of young women who became doctors in rural Texas and New York City in the late nineteenth century; of a homesteader and businessman among settler colonists in Colorado; and of sisters who married into the Wetherill family—known for their discovery of Ancient Pueblo sites at Mesa Verde and elsewhere—who catered to a taste for Western myths with a trading post on a Navajo reservation and a guest ranch for tourists on the upper Rio Grande. Whether they tell of dabbling in antebellum reforms like spiritualism, vegetarianism, and water cures; building schools for free blacks in Ohio or championing Indian rights in the West; serving in the US Army or confronting the struggles of early women doctors and educators, these letters reveal the sweep of American history on an intimate scale, as it was lived and felt and described by individuals; their family story reflects the richness and complexity of the genealogy of the nation.

Part of the regionalist movement that included Grant Wood, Paul Engle, Hamlin Garland, and Jay G. Sigmund, James Hearst helped create what Iowa novelist Ruth Suckow called a poetry of place. A lifelong Iowa farner, Hearst began writing poetry at age nineteen and eventually wrote thirteen books of poems, a novel, short stories, cantatas, and essays, which gained him a devoted following Many of his poems were published in the regionalist periodicals of the time, including the Midland, and by the great regional presses, including Carroll Coleman's Prairie Press. Drawing on his experiences as a farmer, Hearst wrote with a distinct voice of rural life and its joys and conflicts, of his own battles with physical and emotional pain (he was partially paralyzed in a farm accident), and of his own place in the world. His clear eye offered a vision of the midwestern agrarian life that was sympathetic but not sentimental - a people and an art rooted in place.

By 1926, it seemed that John R. Brinkley's experimental rejuvenation cure—transplanting goat glands into aging men—had taken the nation by storm. Never mind that "Doc" Brinkley's medical credentials were shaky at best and that he prescribed medication over the airwaves via his high-power radio stations. To most in the medical field, he was a quack. But to his many patients and listeners, he was a brilliant surgeon, a savior of their lost manhood and youth. His rogue radio stations, XER and its successor XERA, eventually broadcast at an antenna-shattering 1,000,000 watts and not only were a megaphone for Brinkley's lucrative quackery but also hosted an unprecedented number of then-unknown country musicians and other guests. The Bizarre Careers of John R. Brinkley tells the story of the infamous "Goat Gland Doctor"—a controversial medical charlatan, groundbreaking radio impresario, and prescient political campaigner—and recounts his amazing rags-to-riches-to-rags career. A master manipulator and skilled con artist, Brinkley left behind a patchwork of myths and unreliable personal accounts that many writers have merely perpetuated—until now. Alton Lee brings Brinkley's infamous legacy to the forefront, exploring how he ruthlessly exploited the sexual frustrations of aging men and the general public's antipathy toward medical doctors. Lee leaves no stone unturned in this account of a man who changed the course of American institutions forever.

This title documents the burgeoning eco art movement from A to Z, presenting a panorama of artistic responses to environmental concerns, from Ant Farms anti-consumer antics in the 1970s to Marina Zurkows 2007 animation that anticipates the havoc wreaked upon the planet by global warming.