Proposal For A Charter To Build A Railroad From Lake Michigan To The Pacific Ocean

The Everett D. Graff Collection of Western Americana consists of some 10,000 books, manuscripts, maps, pamphlets, broadsides, broadsheets, and photographs, of which about half are described in the present catalogue. The Graff Collection displays the remarkable breadth of interest, knowledge, and taste of a great bibliophile and student of Western American history. From this rich collection, now in The Newberry Library, Chicago, its former Curator, Colton Storm, has compiled a discriminating and representative Catalogue of the rarer and more unusual materials. Collectors, bibliographers, librarians, historians, and book dealers specializing in Americana will find the Graff Catalogue an interesting and essential tool. Detailed collations and binding descriptions are cited, and many of the more important works have been annotated by Mr. Graff and Mr. Storm. An extensive index of persons and subjects makes the book useful to the scholar as well as to the collector and dealer. The book is not a bibliography but rather a guide to rare or unique source materials now enriching The Newberry Library's outstanding holdings in American history.

Lynchburg, Virginia, is not and has never been a typical Southern city. It grew and thrived not by commitment to agriculture, but manufacture. All the while, it retained its cultural identity as a Southern city, wedded to Southern “gentlemanliness” with all of its implications. Though a slow and conservative city, Lynchburg has developed a unique identity. It is a city with enormous vitality, great engagement, and large resiliency in large affairs or times of crisis (such as the Civil War, depressions and booms). Its resolve, measured and passionless, is essentially Stoical. More than the sum of its people-parts, it is a city with a soul. Beginning with the early history of Virginia, this book covers seriatim Lynchburg’s infrastructure (such as its canal and railroad systems), religious/educative legacy, economics, key moments, and other defining aspects (including newspapers, politics, medicine, and entertainment).