Each story within Snapshots places the characters in situations where their past behaviors will be changed in a moment that is like a snapshot picture: freezing in time who they are in a moment but facing new challenges that will alter that snapshot and create a new reality. Eudora Welty’s quote “A good snapshot keeps a moment from going away” is a theme that permeates all of the stories in Eliot Parker’s collection of short stories, Snapshots. These stories are set in West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky. In the plots of the stories, the makeup of the characters is more interesting and important than the circumstances that the characters find themselves trying to manage. Each protagonist finds themselves in a complicated set of personal and professional relationships. By their nature, relationships are complicated. The protagonists in these stories are shaped by their backgrounds, life experiences, and expectations of other people. Conflicts arise for these protagonists when decisions and choices made by others alter the expectations and circumstances expected by the protagonists. In each of these stories, the lives, values, and beliefs held by the characters are deconstructed and each of them face a new reality brought on by an experience or situation that forces them to reexamine who they are and who they need to become. Each of these characters occupy a variety of professional spaces: cops, a rich, successful couple, convicted criminals, and others grieving the loss of a loved one and grieving the absence of love.

The story of a young Mexican boy living in a colonia (trash dump community) who takes the first steps toward realizing his dream of getting an education.

The landscape of southwestern Wyoming around the ghost town of Fossil is beautiful but harsh; a dry, high mountain desert with cool nights and long, cold winters inhabited by a sparse mountain desert community. But during the early Eocene, more than fifty million years ago, it was a subtropical lake, surrounded by volcanoes and forests and teeming with life. Buried within the sun-baked limestone is spectacular evidence of the lush vegetation and plentiful fauna of the ancient past, a transitional ecosystem giving us clues to how North America recovered from a great extinction event that wiped out dinosaurs and the majority of all species on the planet. Paleontologists have been conducting excavations at Fossil Butte for more than 150 years, and with The Lost World of Fossil Lake, one of the world’s leading experts on the fossils from this spectacular locality takes readers on a fascinating journey through the history of the discovery and exploration of the site. Deftly mixing incredible color photographs of the remarkable fossils uncovered at the site with an explanation of their evolutionary significance, Grande presents an unprecedented, comprehensive portrait of the site, its treasures, and what we’ve learned from them. Grande presents a broad range of fossilized organisms from Fossil Lake—from single-celled algae to palm trees to crocodiles—and together they make this long-extinct community come to life in all its diversity and splendor. A field guide and atlas round out the book, enabling readers to identify and classify the majority of the known fossils from the site. Lavishly produced in full color, The Lost World of Fossil Lake is a stunning reminder of the intellectual and physical beauty of scientific investigation—and a breathtaking window onto our planet’s long-lost past.

From the sod houses of South Dakota to the skyscrapers of New York City, these personal photographs form the first people's photo history of America.

Collects photographs of Mississippians that Welty took in the 1930s when she worked for the Works Progress Administration.

2021 Special Edition of the American Educational History Journal (The official journal of the Organization of Educational Historians) The American Educational History Journal is a peer-reviewed, national research journal devoted to the examination of educational topics using perspectives from a variety of disciplines. For more information about the Organization of Educational Historians (OEH) and its annual conference, visit the OEH web site at the web address: www.edhistorians.org. This Special Edition of the American Educational History Journal entitled, Snapshots of Educational History: Portraits of the 21st Century Pandemic, is the first special issue in the history of AEHJ. The word, “unprecedented” has literally been used thousands of times during 2020 by news outlets, in our work environments, and in our daily lives. And indeed, the global pandemic has killed over 600,000 in the United States alone at the time of this writing. The public health crisis shut down everything as we knew it. Captives of sheltering-in-place, scores of incidents displaying horrific police brutality against people of color streamed live on airwaves north, south, east, and west, begetting civil unrest across the country. These are circumstances unlike any we have experienced in our lifetimes. As historians, it is critical that we document this time of crisis so that generations to come can bear witness to this time of turmoil and tragedy. With these ideas in mind, the American Educational History Journal sought to hear from historians and other scholars about this unique and devastating time in our country’s history. The Journal honors the traditions of oral history and narrative storytelling as a means to gather the voices of those whose lives have been touched by the COVID-19 crisis, literally everyone around the globe. This special issue deviates a bit from traditional AEHJ requirements in that we specifically invited narratives, not be full-blown historical research studies. The point of this special issue is for authors themselves to serve as the archival material that will benefit future scholars interested in understanding what it meant to live through this health catastrophe while doing the work of educators. We believe we owe it to the historians of the future to share our voices in real time.