Shappe In Bygone Days

The manuscript is a collection of short stories that were originally prepared as part of a radio program that began in the early 1980's as a summer informational and educational program for Tahoe area residents and tourists. Between 1982 and 1985 the author presented more than one hundred radio tales about Tahoe’s history and the environment over Tahoe radio station KTHO AM-590. Lane returned to the radio airways in 1995, this time with radio station KOWL AM-1490, and has since broadcast more than two thousand tales (“Don Lane’s Tales of Tahoe”). The manuscript is a distinctive mixture of stories about the events, large and small, that shaped and changed the region, and simple stories about the people that once lived in our region during the past 150-years. Stories about pioneer men and women, gold-seekers and adventurers. Tales about the unique characters; the famous like the Donner’s, Mark Twain, John Sutter and James Marshall, and John Fremont, along with the powerful and the forgotten. The manuscript weaves serious history with light-hearted tales with a minimum of editorializing, as the emphasis has been on maintaining historical integrity and authenticity. The stories, gathered from old journals, archives and historical records are both entertaining, and educational. And hopefully too, this manuscript will contribute to an increased awareness of our regional history and a greater appreciation for those people that have been lost inside the pages of history.

Verily this Island of Manhattan is exposed to the danger of being snowed under by the showers of works scattered broadcast by her chroniclers, her eulogists, and her critics. Plentiful has been the crop of local commentaries. "New York in bygone days" is a fair type of one species of these city histories. In the main it is composed of gleanings from more ponderous and elaborate works. Mr. Wilson devotes the first volume to the civic development of the city from the first settlements around the fort to the end of the Civil War. The story is fairly well told, without a single touch of originality. Nor is there evidence that the values of the secondary sources were weighed. Extracts are given from Mrs. Lamb, who certainly permitted her pen to wander into pleasant details where verification is impossible. The excuse for being of this "New York" is that the whole story is thrown together and the reader can follow the growth of modern Gotham from its Dutch origins. In the second volume the localities are described. Still some of the personal touches tacked on to places are fresh, a, for instance, a letter from Margaret Fuller when she was the guest of Horace Greeley. Of her host she says, "His abilities in his own way are great. He believes in mine to a surprising extent. We are true friends," — a sequence delightfully suggestive of a select mutual - admiration society. This edition contains both original volumes.

Alice Morse Earle was a social historian of great note at the turn of the century, and many of her books have lived on as well-researched and well-written texts of everyday life in Colonial America. Curious Punishments of Bygone Days was published in 1896. It is a catalog of early American crimes and their penalties, with chapters on the pillories, stocks, the scarlet letter, the ducking stool, discipline of authors and books (egad!), and four other horrifying examples of ways in which those who transgressed the laws of Colonial America were made to pay for their sins.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1871.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1871.

This is the true story of the childhood of Madie Barbara Bayer Krenz and her family. She wrote most of the following by herself from her memory. It is a story of hard times living in the 1880's and 1890's.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1871.