The history of the Roanoke Valley during the 1940s has largely been unexplored until now. This significant decade bore witness to the birth of the local civil rights movement, the impact of World War II and the postwar boom in public projects and private development. The J-Class locomotives, Carver School, Woodrum Field, Victory Stadium, Carvins Cove, the Roanoke Star, the end of streetcars, and the advent of drive-in theaters all marked the decade. Crowds thronged to see the biggest names in radio, film and music at the American Legion Auditorium, the Academy of Music and the Roanoke Theatre, while Major League baseball and professional football brought exhibition games to Maher Field and Victory Stadium. Local historian Nelson Harris provides a detailed account of this dynamic decade along with 300 archival photographs.

Nestled in the shadows of the Blue Ridge, the Roanoke Valley has developed as the capital region for western Virginia. After a century of growth fueled by transportation, education, and healthcare, the region has undergone significant visible change. While some of the valley's landmarks remain, many have been replaced or dramatically altered.

Author Nelson Harris delves into the annals of history to uncover these marvelous and mostly unknown stories of the Star City of the South. How did a Roanoke neighbor's secret upend North Carolina politics and why did a weeding scandal in Big Lick make front-page headlines in New York? These questions and many more are answered in this exciting volume of hidden stories and forgotten tales from the Star City. Discover why a Roanoker was found frozen in the North Atlantic and what Mother's Day crime and trial shocked the city in 1949. Meet the Black Cardinals, a semi-pro African American baseball team that played in the 1930s and '40s, and find out how a fistfight at Shenandoah Life helped save the company.

Provision of library service to blind and physically handicapped individuals is an ever-developing art/science requiring a knowledge of individual needs, a mastery of information science processes and techniques, and an awareness of the plethora of available print and nonprint resources. This book is intended to bring together a composite overview of the needs of individials unable to use print resources and to describe current and historic practices designed to meet those needs. - Preface.

Queer history is a living practice. Talk to any group of LGBTQ people today, and they will not agree on what story should be told. Many people desire to celebrate the past by erecting plaques and painting rainbow crosswalks, but queer and trans people in the twenty-first century need more than just symbols—they need access to power, justice for marginalized people, spaces of belonging. Approaching the past through a lens of queer and trans survival and world-building transforms history itself into a tool for imagining and realizing a better future. Living Queer History tells the story of an LGBTQ community in Roanoke, Virginia, a small city on the edge of Appalachia. Interweaving &8239;historical analysis, theory, and memoir, Gregory Samantha Rosenthal tells the story of their own journey—coming out and transitioning as a transgender woman—in the midst of working on a community-based history project that documented a multigenerational southern LGBTQ community. Based on over forty interviews with LGBTQ elders, Living Queer History explores how queer people today think about the past and how history lives on in the present.

The areas covered in this book fall in Botetourt and Roanoke counties, Virginia.