Unleashed by ancient geologic forces, a magnitude 8.25 earthquake rocked San Francisco in the early hours of April 18, 1906. Less than a minute later, the city lay in ruins. Bestselling author Simon Winchester brings his inimitable storytelling abilities to this extraordinary event, exploring the legendary earthquake and fires that spread horror across San Francisco and northern California in 1906 as well as its startling impact on American history and, just as important, what science has recently revealed about the fascinating subterranean processes that produced it--and almost certainly...

It is one of the most sensational criminal cases...

In this theoretically innovative study, Moon-Kie Jung explains how Filipinos, Japanese, Portuguese, and others overcame entrenched racial divisions and successfully mobilized...

It seems difficult even to imagine the modern West without reference to its planes, trains, and automobiles. Freeways define modern Los Angeles, as Route 66 still recalls the freedom of the open road. Seattle, long home to Boeing, gave birth to jetliners such as the 707. And once trains with glamorous names like The Sunset Limited and The Great Northern Flyer carried passengers in posh luxury through the grand vistas of the West. "Railways, highways, and skyways link landscapes both ordinary and sublime for tourists in search of scenic splendor," observes Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes. But...

At a time when immigration policy is the subject of heated debate, this book makes clear that the true wealth of America is in the diversity of its peoples. By the end of the 20th century the American West was home to nearly half of America's immigrant population, including Asians and Armenians, Germans and Greeks, Mexicans, Italians, Swedes, Basques, and others. This book tells their rich and complex story-of adaptation and isolation, maintaining and mixing traditions, and an ongoing ebb and flow of movement, assimilation, and replenishment. These immigrants and their children built...

Since the days of the wild West, Montanans have struggled to be "tough on crime" with limited resources. During Montana's early territorial years, "criminal justice" was almost nonexistent: a few towns had inadequate and chronically overcrowded jails; occasional prisoners were sent east to the federal penitentiary in Detroit; and vigilantes summarily dealt with others suspected of crimes. In 1871, the federal government funded a penitentiary in Deer Lodge that was turned over to Montana when it achieved statehood in 1889. In this absorbing book, Keith Edgerton provides...

In Seattle's Women Teachers of the Interwar Years, Doris Pieroth describes the contributions of a remarkable group of women who dominated the Seattle public school system in the early years of the twentieth century and helped to produce well-educated citizens who were responsible for the widespread philanthropic, volunteer, and municipal activities that came to characterize the city.

While most publications on the history of education have emphasized theory or administration, Pieroth focuses on individual teachers. Set against the backdrop of a developing city, the book...

Selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2003

The word "violence" conjures up images of terrorism, bombings, and lynchings. Beaten Down is concerned with more prosaic acts of physical force--a husband slapping his wife, a parent taking a birch branch to a child, a pair of drunken friends squaring off to establish who was the "better man." David Peterson del Mar accounts for the social relations of power that lie behind this intimate form of violence, this "white noise" that has always been with us, humming quietly between more explosive acts of...

These warmly affectionate letters, presented here in their entirety, describe the new...