Past Meridian

"Haber and Gratton lay to rest many conventional assumptions concerning the place of older persons in American history." -- Choice "Haber and Gratton's meaty little book does more than provide an intelligent synthesis of existing old-age history; its new interpretations, insights, and shifts of emphasis will provoke responses and help move historians' work away from the now threadbare original disputes in e field toward new questions and approaches." -- American Historical Review "Indeed, Haber and Gratton give us a refreshingly multidimensional history of the shift in old-age security from work, assets, or children to government annuities." -- Contemporary Sociology "... the history of old age has finally come of age. The authors successfully synthesize the best of the earlier social and cultural studies with new empirical evidence and recent findings of economic historians." -- Journal of Economic History "A truly 'revisionary' interpretation of the cultural and structural forces that shaped the elderly's lives from the colonial period to the present. Lucid and controversial, [it] is bound to be widely cited and hotly contested." -- W. Andrew Achenbaum This social history of the American elderly offers a provocative new view of aging in the United States. It revises traditional assumptions about the economic status of the old and challenges the long-held contention that industrialization destroyed family relationships.

25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

“Lively, well-written and informative . . . It will be of great interest to fans of railroads in the deep South and their motive power and operations.” —Railfan & Railroad This generously illustrated narrative follows the evolution of dozens of separate railroads in the Meridian, Mississippi, area from the destruction of the town’s rail facilities in the 1850s through the current era of large-scale consolidation. Presently, there are only seven mega-size rail systems in the United States, three of which serve Meridian, making it an important junction on one of the nation’s four major transcontinental routes. The recent creation of a nationally prominent high-speed freight line between Meridian and Shreveport, the “Meridian Speedway,” has allowed the Union Pacific, Kansas City Southern, and Norfolk Southern railroads to offer the shortest rail route across the continent for Asia-US-Europe transportation. “This volume [is] an excellent presentation, in addition to being a railroad history story that ends on a positive, upbeat note.” —Michigan Railfan “An excellent contribution to the history of railroads in the South. Southern railroading in general has been a chronically neglected subject.” —Herbert H. Harwood, Jr., author of The Lake Shore Electric Railway Story “Chronicles Meridian’s intriguing 155-year history as a center of railroad activity.” —The Meridian Star