The Conquest of Labor offers the first biography of Daniel Pratt (1799-1873), a New Hampshire native who became one of the South's most important industrialists. After moving to Alabama in 1833, Pratt started a cotton gin factory near Montgomery that by the eve of the Civil War had become the largest in the world. Pratt became a household name in cotton-growing states, and Prattville-the site of his operations-one of the antebellum South's most celebrated manufacturing towns. Based on a rich cache of personal and business records, Curtis J. Evans's study of Daniel Pratt and his "Yankee" town in the heart of the Deep South challenges the conventional portrayal of the South as a premodern region hostile to industrialization and shows that, contrary to current popular thought, the South was not so markedly different from the North.

The Monadnock Region has been referred to as New Hampshire's "forgotten corner." It is a quiet region known for its historic New England villages and beautiful natural landscape. Overlooked tales from the past prove that this has not always been a quiet place, however. Mark Twain, Amelia Earhart, robber baron Jubilee Jim Fisk, infamous actress May Yohe, and miser Hetty Green, the richest woman in the United States, all spent time in the quiet corner. Noteworthy inventors, outspoken women, military heroes, nationally prominent businessmen, and dastardly criminals all called the region home. Local historian and author Alan F. Rumrill has compiled stories that reveal a region defined by its Yankee character - and filled with Yankee characters.

A collection of Gardner Family Histories as compiled by Marie Gardner.

Before Thomas Edison, light and fire were thought to be one and the same. Turns out, they were separate things altogether. This book takes a similar relationship, that of time and place, and shows how they, too, were once inseparable. Time keeping was once a local affair, when small towns set their own pace according to the rising and setting of the sun. Then, in 1883, the expanding railroads necessitated the creation of Standard Time zones, and communities became linked by a universal time. Here Howard Mansfield explores how our sudden interconnectedness, both physically, as through the railroad, and through inventions like the telegraph, changed our concept of time and place forever.