The Classic Western American Railroad Routes

In 1869 the east and west coasts of the USA were at last linked by rail, launching what is now known as the “golden age of the railroad.” Within twenty years several other major transcontinental routes had been opened, and the railroad companies who had invested millions of dollars need to attract both freight and passengers. To celebrate these pioneering routes, the railroad companies, enterprising publishers and even the United States Geological Service, produced a large quantity of colorful literature, including souvenir books, foldout postcards and illustrated maps. This exciting volume, packed with rare railroadiana and expertly-written text, brings those wonderful days back to life!

A companion volume to "The Classic Western American Railroad Routes". Following the successful and innovative format of the western routes volume, this book traces the development, history and routes of the major eastern American railroads using contemporary maps, photographs, illustrations and ephemera.

Julius Holthaus, a humble American farm boy, went to France to help fill the depleted ranks of the Allies in America’s largest battle of World War I, the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. He had no idea what he was getting into. The fight would involve more than a million American doughboys, span forty-seven days, and result in the deaths of tens of thousands of people in one of the bloodiest battle in American military history. Countless books focus on great military leaders, war heroes, and battle tactics, but one must look at war on a human scale to truly understand its toll. That understanding comes through examining the life and diary of Holthaus. Author Clyde Cremer explores them in detail, supplementing the diary’s information with the insights he gleaned during six years of research. This history follows a single soldier from rural Idaho and Iowa through his enlistment, training, and final trauma in the dark, disenchanted forest of the Argonne. Filled with facts and historical anecdotes, this could be the story of many of the members of the American Expeditionary Forces sent overseas in World War I. Their names are not listed in the history books, but they all answered their country’s call and should be remembered.

By 1870, only one group of American Indians in the 300,000 square miles of the Dakota and Montana Territories still held firm against being placed on reservations: a few thousand Teton Sioux and Northern Cheyennes, all followers of the charismatic Sitting Bull. It was then that Philadelphia’s Jay Cooke, “the financier of the Civil War,” a man who believed that he was “God’s chosen instrument,” funded a second transcontinental railroad. This line, the Northern Pacific, would follow the Yellowstone River through Montana, separating the last buffalo herds from Sitting Bull’s people and disrupting their way of life. Road to War tells the fascinating story of the inevitable clash of wills between a fierce, proud people fighting to retain their traditional way of life and a devout man who, with the full support of President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration and the U.S. Army, was intent on carrying out what he believed to be God’s will and America’s destiny. The chronological first of three volumes documenting the Northern Pacific’s Yellowstone valley surveys between 1871 and 1873, Road to War tells its story through excerpts from unpublished letters, diaries, official reports, and period newspapers that reflect the never-ending intrigue, corruption and profiteering, politics, and unanticipated physical hardships. Lubetkin shows the railroad’s drive west, along with the rough humor and profanity of railroad managers, alcoholic army officers, apprehensive Indian agents, and especially the young surveyors working in intolerable heat, swamps, and arctic cold. All these details tell the real story of building a railroad while keeping an eye open for Sitting Bull’s warriors. Road to War shows history as it really unfolded on the western plains. Although the Indians’ former way of life was coming to an end, it would not come quietly.

By 1870, only one group of American Indians in the 300,000 square miles of the Dakota and Montana Territories still held firm against being placed on reservations: a few thousand Teton Sioux and Northern Cheyennes, all followers of the charismatic Sitting Bull. It was then that Philadelphia’s Jay Cooke, “the financier of the Civil War,” a man who believed that he was “God’s chosen instrument,” funded a second transcontinental railroad. This line, the Northern Pacific, would follow the Yellowstone River through Montana, separating the last buffalo herds from Sitting Bull’s people and disrupting their way of life. Road to War tells the fascinating story of the inevitable clash of wills between a fierce, proud people fighting to retain their traditional way of life and a devout man who, with the full support of President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration and the U.S. Army, was intent on carrying out what he believed to be God’s will and America’s destiny. The chronological first of three volumes documenting the Northern Pacific’s Yellowstone valley surveys between 1871 and 1873, Road to War tells its story through excerpts from unpublished letters, diaries, official reports, and period newspapers that reflect the never-ending intrigue, corruption and profiteering, politics, and unanticipated physical hardships. Lubetkin shows the railroad’s drive west, along with the rough humor and profanity of railroad managers, alcoholic army officers, apprehensive Indian agents, and especially the young surveyors working in intolerable heat, swamps, and arctic cold. All these details tell the real story of building a railroad while keeping an eye open for Sitting Bull’s warriors. Road to War shows history as it really unfolded on the western plains. Although the Indians’ former way of life was coming to an end, it would not come quietly.

This book picks up where the previous two Classic American titles left off, focusing on the golden age of American railroading from 1945 to the early 1970s. It extends to the present day where applicable, providing a colorful look at locomotives, passenger and freight operations, development, and, in some cases, demise. Full color.

In the latest mystery from New York Times bestselling author Charles Todd, World War I nurse and amateur sleuth Bess Crawford investigates an old murder that occurred during her childhood in India, a search for the truth that will transform her and leave her pondering a troubling question: How can facts lie? Bess Crawford enjoyed a wondrous childhood in India, where her father, a colonel in the British Army, was stationed on the Northwest Frontier. But an unforgettable incident darkened that happy time. In 1908, Colonel Crawford's regiment discovered that it had a murderer in its ranks, an officer who killed five people in India and England yet was never brought to trial. In the eyes of many of these soldiers, men defined by honor and duty, the crime was a stain on the regiment's reputation and on the good name of Bess's father, the Colonel Sahib, who had trained the killer. A decade later, tending to the wounded on the battlefields of France during World War I, Bess learns from a dying Indian sergeant that the supposed murderer, Lieutenant Wade, is alive—and serving at the Front. Bess cannot believe the shocking news. According to reliable reports, Wade's body had been seen deep in the Khyber Pass, where he had died trying to reach Afghanistan. Soon, though, her mind is racing. How had he escaped from India? What had driven a good man to murder in cold blood? Wanting answers, she uses her leave to investigate. In the village where the first three killings took place, she discovers that the locals are certain that the British soldier was innocent. Yet the present owner of the house where the crime was committed believes otherwise, and is convinced that Bess's father helped Wade flee. To settle the matter once and for all, Bess sets out to find Wade and let the courts decide. But when she stumbles on the horrific truth, something that even the famous writer Rudyard Kipling had kept secret all his life, she is shaken to her very core. The facts will damn Wade even as they reveal a brutal reality, a reality that could have been her own fate.

Departing from Jacques Derrida’s appropriations of cinders as a trope of war atrocity aftermath, this book examines writings that deal with war trauma memories in Asian-American communities. Seeing war experiences and their associative diasporas and affects as the core and axis, it considers the multifarious poetics and politics of minority trauma writings, and posits a possible interpretive framework for contemporary Asian-American writings, including those written by Julie Otsuka, Joseph Craig Danner, Monique Truong, Nguyen Viet Thanh, Janice Lowe Shinebourne, and Andre Lamontagne. As these writings contain works regarding Japanese-American, Indo-Chinese Guyanese, Chinese Quebeçois, Vietnamese exiles/refugees, and Vietnam-American experiences, this book presents a broad cross-cultural view on migration and minority issues triggered by wars and precarious conditions, as the diversified experiences examined here epitomize an intricate historical intimacy across four continents: Asia, the Americas, Africa and Europe.