EXCERPT: -So great was the ferment of reform in the pre-Civil War United States that to understand it, to grasp the motives of the reformers, the nature of their work, their successes and failures, is to understand much about the American nation as a whole. To be sure, there was more to antebellum history than reform. At the same time that the reformers were trying to change men's ideas and actions, other Americans were holding fast to traditional concepts and ways of doing things. Even as the reformers were battering the walls of unrighteousness, both they and other men were taming wild...

THE GATES OF GORMYRE Mason and Bianca Winslow appear to be a typical happily married couple, complete with a nine year old son, Caleb...until the evening of a local Halloween Festival. During the festival, Mason and Bianca begin having flashbacks-of lives in a parallel dimension, before Caleb was born. Mason is the son of a pirate captain, and Bianca is a gypsy. In this dimension pirates and gypsies are mortal enemies; thus their love is a forbidden one. A magic show is the grand finale of the Halloween Festival, and Caleb is chosen from the audience to vanish into thin air, which he does,...