This colorful and perceptive study presents persuasive evidence that the saloon, far from being a magnet for vice and crime, played an important role in working-class community life. Focusing on public drinking in "wide open" Chicago and tightly controlled Boston, Duis offers a provocative discussion of the saloon as a social institution and a locus of the struggle between middle-class notions of privacy and working-class uses of public space.

Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen (1891 –1964) published just two novels and three short stories in her lifetime, but achieved lasting literary acclaim. Her classic novel Passing first appeared in 1926.

Leanna Cahill: Guardian Angel or Scarlet Woman? Leanna Cahill, once the pretty, spoiled darling of Cahill Crossing, is coming home to a very different sort of welcome. As an unwed, single mother with a band of former ladies-of-the-night in tow, her reputation is in tatters! Cleve Holden, itinerant gambler and inveterate charmer, seems intent on seducing Leanna. But he has come to town for one reason and one reason only: to take back his abandoned nephew from the scarlet woman pretending to be his mother….