"An essential, surprising journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South--and a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand America"--

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. “The Oregon Trail” offers a critical view of the Conestoga wagon generation. The result of the notes Parkman took along the newly-developed roads to the West, the book put an end to the sentimentalized portrait of pioneer travel. Altering the course of American history and shaping early views of Native Americans, it denounces, in its descriptions of the Oglala...

"Miracle Country captures one family's spirit and losses in a harsh landscape that has been shaped and exploited over hundreds of years, and chronicles the author's journey as she realizes that there's nowhere else in the country, no matter how green and welcoming, that feels like home"--

"On an autumn morning in 1849, Henry David Thoreau stepped out his front door to walk the beaches of Cape Cod. Over a century and a half later, Ben Shattuck does the same. With little more than a loaf of bread, brick of cheese, and a notebook, Shattuck sets out to retrace Thoreau's path through the Cape's outer beaches, from the elbow to Provincetown's fingertip. This is the first of six journeys taken by Shattuck, each one inspired by a walk once...

A chronicle of the mid-nineteenth-century wagon train tragedy draws on the perspectives of one of its survivors, Sarah Graves, recounting how her new husband and she joined the Donner party on their California-bound journey and encountered violent perils, in an account that also offers insight into the scientific reasons that some died while others survived.

Combines an account of Robert Louis Stevenson's experiences as he traveled from New York to California by train in 1879 and a description of the building and operation of railroads in nineteenth-century America.

The Winter Edition includes the National Toy Train Musuem in Pennsylvania; the Queen City Bronze handbell ensemble; a look back at astronaut John Glenn and other pioneering astronauts; a special holiday train ride for kids at the Strasburg Railroad; and more.