"A girl named Ruth Anne tells the story of her family's train journey from North Carolina to New York City as part of the Great Migration"--

Defined less by geography than by demographic character, Block, Kansas, in many ways exemplifies the prevalent yet seldom-scrutinized ethnic, religion-based community of the rural Midwest. Physically small, the town sprang up around four corners formed by crossroads. Spiritually strong and cohesive, it became the educational and cultural center for generations of German-Lutheran families. In this book Carol Coburn analyzes the powerful combination...

The story of one African American family fighting to stay together and strong in the face of brutal racist attacks, illness, poverty, and betrayal in the Deep South of the 1930s.

"In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working-class Americans had eating habits that were distinctly shaped by jobs, families, neighborhoods, and the tools, utilities, and size of their kitchens - along with their cultural heritage. 'How the Other Half Ate' is a deep exploration by historian Katherine Leonard Turner that delivers an unprecedented and thoroughly researched study of the changing food landscape in American working-class...

"Placing the era firmly within the American experience, this reference illuminates what daily life was really like in the 1950s, including for people from the "Other America"--those outside the prosperous, white middle class."--Provided by publisher.

Drawing on the searing letters that Walt, George, their mother Louisa, and their other brothers, wrote to each other during the Civil War, and on new evidence and new readings of the great poet, Now the Drum of War chronicles the experience of the Whitman family--from rural Long Island to working-class Brooklyn--enduring its own long crisis alongside the anguish of the nation.

On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different yet equally remarkable children: Frank, the brilliant, stubborn firstborn; Joe, whose love of animals makes him the natural heir to his family's land; Lillian, an angelic child who enters a fairy-tale marriage with a man only she will fully know; Henry, the bookworm who's not afraid to be different; and Claire, who...

In 1953, the Langdon family at a crossroads. Their stalwart patriarch, Walter, who with his wife, Rosanna, sustained their farm for three decades, has suddenly died, leaving their five children, now adults, looking to the future. Only one will remain in Iowa to work the land, while the others scatter to Washington, D.C., California, and everywhere in between. As the country moves out of post-World War II optimism through the darker landscape of the...

Focuses on some of the highlights of the dark years of the Great Depression as they impacted one family--Wally and Ruth Chilstrom and their eight children. This is the account of how they made it though those stressful times. Low crop price, tragic personal losses, births and miscarriages, threats to dignity, family separation during difficult times, unemployment, bank failures, severe weather, signs of change for the better, followed by more disappointment--are...