The fascinating story of a cotton magnate whose voracious appetite for land drove him to create the first big agricultural empire of the Central Valley of California, and shaped the landscape for decades to come. J.G. Boswell was the biggest farmer in America. He built a secret empire while thumbing his nose at nature, politicians, labor unions and every journalist who ever tried to lift the veil on the ultimate "factory in the fields." The King of California is the previously untold account of how a Georgia slave-owning family migrated to California in the early 1920s,drained one of America 's biggest lakes in an act of incredible hubris and carved out the richest cotton empire in the world. Indeed, the sophistication of Boswell 's agricultural operation -from lab to field to gin -- is unrivaled anywhere. Much more than a business story, this is a sweeping social history that details the saga of cotton growers who were chased from the South by the boll weevil and brought their black farmhands to California. It is a gripping read with cameos by a cast of famous characters, from Cecil B. DeMille to Cesar Chavez.

Like music, art is a universal language. Although looking at works of art is a pleasurable enough experience, to appreciate them fully requires certain skills and knowledge." --Carol Strickland, from the introduction to The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern * This heavily illustrated crash course in art history is revised and updated. This second edition of Carol Strickland's The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern offers an illustrated tutorial of prehistoric to post-modern art from cave paintings to video art installations to digital and Internet media. * Featuring succinct page-length essays, instructive sidebars, and more than 300 photographs, The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern takes art history out of the realm of dreary textbooks, demystifies jargon and theory, and makes art accessible-even at a cursory reading. * From Stonehenge to the Guggenheim and from Holbein to Warhol, more than 25,000 years of art is distilled into five sections covering a little more than 200 pages.

By: Lawrence Dalton, Pub. 1946, Reprinted 2021, 408 pages, ISBN #978-1-63914-018-3. Randolph County was created in 1835 from Lawrence County and is located within the Ozark region along the Missouri border. This book is not too different from other county history books of this era. With such topics as towns, trade and transportation, labor, farming, politics, and race relations - all important in the development of the county - are carefully discussed. This type of county history book can help one develop ideas or paths to those missing ancestors by showing the customs and traditions of the local residents. A particular useful feature of this book are the biographical sketches of the following persons: Athy, Bryan, Campbell, Dalton (3), Decker, Davis-Spikes, Hite, Hogan (2), Ingram, Jarrett, Johnston, Johnson, Haynes, Holt, Lamb, McCarroll, Mock, Marlette, Maynard, Martin, Rickman, Ruff, Shride, Stubblefield, Schoonover, Smith, Shaver, Spikes, Taylor, McColgan, Thompson, Lemmons, Price, Wyatt and White.