The Grand Idea follows George Washington in the critical period immediately after the War of Independence. The general had great hopes for his young nation, but also grave fears. He worried that the United States was so fragmented politically and culturally that it would fall apart, and that the "West," beyond the Appalachian mountains, would become a breakaway republic. So he came up with an ambitious scheme: He would transform the Potomac River into the nation's premier commercial artery, binding East and West, bolstering domestic trade, and staving off disunion. This was no armchair notion. Washington saddled up and rode west on a 680-mile trek to the raucous frontier of America. Achenbach captures a Washington rarely seen: rugged frontiersman, real estate speculator, shrewd businessman. Even after his death, Washington's grand ambition inspired heroic engineering feats, including an audacious attempt to build a canal across the mountains to the Ohio River. But the country needed more than commercial arteries to hold together, and in the Civil War, the general's beloved river became a battlefield between North and South. Like such classics as Undaunted Courage and Founding Brothers, Achenbach's riveting portrait of a great man and his grand plan captures the imagination of the new country, the passions of an ambitious people, and the seemingly endless beauty of the American landscape.

This is the history of American whitewater canoeing and kayaking, tracing the evolution of whitewater padding through the people, rivers and events of the last 60 years. Covers wood/canvas canoes and folding kayaks to composites and plastics, from slalom and squirt to rodeo and extreme boating.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, indigenous communities in the United States and Australia suffered a common experience at the hands of state authorities: the removal of their children to institutions in the name of assimilating American Indians and protecting Aboriginal people. Although officially characterized as benevolent, these government policies often inflicted great trauma on indigenous families and ultimately served the settler nations? larger goals of consolidating control over indigenous peoples and their lands. White Mother to a Dark Racetakes the study of indigenous education and acculturation in new directions in its examination of the key roles white women played in these policies of indigenous child-removal. Government officials, missionaries, and reformers justified the removal of indigenous children in particularly gendered ways by focusing on the supposed deficiencies of indigenous mothers, the alleged barbarity of indigenous men, and the lack of a patriarchal nuclear family. Often they deemed white women the most appropriate agents to carry out these child-removal policies. Inspired by the maternalist movement of the era, many white women were eager to serve as surrogate mothers to indigenous children and maneuvered to influence public policy affecting indigenous people. Although some white women developed caring relationships with indigenous children and others became critical of government policies, many became hopelessly ensnared in this insidious colonial policy.

In his third poetry collection, Primer, Aaron Smith grapples with the ugly realities of the private self, in which desire feels more like a trap than fulfillment. What is the face we prepare in our public lives to distract others from our private grief? Smith's poetry explores that inexplicable tension between what we say and how we actually feel, exposing the complications of intimacy and the limitations of language to bridge those distances between friends, family members, and lovers. What we deny, in the end, may be just what we actually survive. Mortality in Smith's work remains the uncomfortable foundation at the center of our relationship with others, to faith, to art, to love as we grow older, and ultimately, to our own sense of who we are in our bodies in the world. The struggle of this book, finally, is in naming whether just what we say we want is enough to satisfy our primal needs, or are the choices we make to stay alive the same choices we make to help us, in so many small ways, to die.

Review, rethink, and redesign racial support systems NOW As schools engage in courageous conversations about how racialization and racial positioning influences thinking, behaviors, and expectations, many educators still lack the resources to start this challenging and personally transformative work. Race Resilience offers guidance to educators who are ready to rethink, review, and redesign their support systems and foster the building blocks of resiliency for staff. Readers will learn how to: Model ethical, professional, and social-emotional sensitivity Develop, advocate, and enact on a collective culture Maintain a continuously evaluative process for self and school wellness Engage meaningfully with students and their families Improve academic and behavioral outcomes Race resilient educators work continuously to grow their awareness of how their racial identity impacts their practice. When educators feel they are cared for, have trusting relationships, and are autonomous, they are in a better position to teach and model resilience to their students.

Looking down upon the Potomac from his verandah at Mount Vernon, recently retired General George Washington imagined a route through the mountains to the vastness of the West. He was wrong about the river, but not about his country's destiny.

""A Second Reckoning" tells the heartbreaking story of the murder that led to the city of Annapolis's last hanging and a broader appeal for posthumous justice, especially in racially tainted cases"--