The journey of an adopted child to finding his biological family. The twists and turns and surprises along the way expose all of the misleading “facts”, even the very place of birth.

Outlaws on Horseback concentrates on the long, unbroken chain of crime that began in the late 1850s with the Missouri-Kansas border warfare and ended in Arkansas in 1921 with the killing of Henry Starr, the last of the authentic desperadoes. Harry Sinclair Drago shows links among the men and women who terrorized the Midwest while he squelches the most outlandish tales about them. The guerrilla warfare led by the evil William Quantrill was training for Frank and Jesse James and Cole and Jim Younger. Drago puts their bloody careers in perspective and tracks down the truth about Belle Starr the Bandit Queen, Cherokee Bill, Rose of the Cimarron, and the gangs, including the Daltons and Doolins, that infested the Oklahoma hills. The action moves from the sacking of Lawrence to the raid on Northfield to the shootout at Coffeyville.

Standoffs, saloons, and sunsets spring to mind when one envisions the rough and tumble early days of the American frontier.

"This is the best all-around media law text for undergraduate and graduate students alike. The clear, nonthreatening writing style of the authors, by itself, sets this book apart. And yet, it does so by not leaving out any important areas of inquiry. That’s why my colleagues and I continue to adopt this for all of our media law classes." —Jonathan Kotler, University of Southern California In The Law of Journalism and Mass Communication, authors Susan Dente Ross, Amy Reynolds, and Robert Trager present a lively, up-to-date, and comprehensive introduction to media law that brings the law to life for future professional communicators. The book is grounded in the traditions and rules of law but also contains fresh facts and relevant examples that keep readers engaged. Tightly focused breakout boxes highlight contemporary examples of the law in action or emphasize central points of law as well as intersections with international law and policy. The thoroughly updated Seventh Edition contains a wealth of new content that is as timely as possible—from the U.S. Supreme Court, federal and state courts, Congress, executive agencies, federal and state policymakers and advisory groups, and media organizations and allies. A refreshed look, feel, and flow of chapters provide readers an understanding of fast-expanding areas of the law and legal complexities.

An overdue examination of widely marginalized writings by women of the American antebellum period, U.S. Women Writers presents a new model for evaluating U.S. relations and interactions with foreign countries in the colonial and postcolonial periods by examining the ways in which women writers were both proponents of colonialization and subversive agents for change. Etsuko Taketani explores attempts to inculcate imperialist values through education in the works of Lydia Maria Child, Sarah Tuttle, Catherine Beecher, and others and the results of viewing the world through these values, as reflected in the writings of Harriet low, Emily Judson, and Sarah hale. Many of the texts Taketani uncovers from relative obscurity illuminate the American attitude toward others whether Native American, African American, African, or Asian. She not only sheds lights on the life of the writers she examines, but she also situates each writer s works alongside those of her contemporaries to give the reader a clear picture of the cultural context. The Author: Etsuko Taketani is associate professor of English in the Institute of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. Her articles have appeared in American Literary History, Children s Literature, Melville Society Extracts, and other publications. "

The first large-scale examination of William Wurster's work.

"Few characters as obscure as Canadian novelist Frank L. Packard's gentleman cracksman, Jimmie Dale the Gray Seal, have had the impact and long term import of this one. Almost unknown today, Packard and his creation not only exerted a tremendous influence on the pulps he came from, but established many of the tropes of the modern superhero in comic books. From his secret lair, the Sanctuary, his multiple identities, and his calling card, a gray diamond paper seal, Jimmie Dale set the pattern for the mystery men and super heroes who will follow." - David L. Vineyard In the summer of 1912 New York City was being terrorized by a bizarre organization of metal-clawed criminals who ascend stone walls as easily as others climb stairs. Dubbed the Spider Gang by the press, they roamed over every part of Manhattan from neighborhoods of squalid tenements to the most luxurious mansions of the rich. It wasn't wealth that they sought however, instead it was the City's most beautiful women who were being carried off for some unknown purpose. A new challenge for the Gray Seal! The very first in a long, long line of crime-fighting urban vigilantes has returned in an all new novel length adventure. More than a century ago bored society millionaire Jimmie Dale hid his identity behind a mask and slouch hat to become the safe-cracking master criminal known as the Gray Seal. His objective was excitement rather than financial gain, but quickly decided that justice was a still more worthy goal. Dale became feared and hunted by both the police and the underworld as he waged a one-man war on evildoers the law could not stop. Commanded by the mysterious woman of a thousand faces known as the Tocsin, Jimmie Dale pits himself against those who prey on the weakest members of society. The Gray Seal novels of Frank Packard influenced a wide range of heroes including The Shadow, the Spider, and the Green Hornet. The Gray Seal strikes again!

In four decades of writing for magazines ranging from Texas Monthly to the Atlantic, American History, and Travel Holiday, Stephen Harrigan has established himself as one of America’s most thoughtful writers. In this career-spanning anthology, which gathers together essays from two previous books—A Natural State and Comanche Midnight—as well as previously uncollected work, readers finally have a comprehensive collection of Harrigan’s best nonfiction. History—natural history, human history, and personal history—and place are the cornerstones of The Eye of the Mammoth. But the specific history or place varies considerably from essay to essay. Harrigan’s career has taken him from the Alaska Highway to the Chihuahuan Desert, from the casinos of Monaco to his ancestors’ village in the Czech Republic. Texas is the subject of a number of essays, and a force in shaping others, as in “The Anger of Achilles,” in which a nineteenth-century painting moves the author despite his possessing a “Texan’s suspicion of serious culture.” Harrigan’s deceptively straightforward voice, however, belies an intense curiosity about things that, by his own admission, may be “unknowable.” Certainly, we are limited in what we can know about the inner life of George Washington, the last days of Davy Crockett, or the motives of a caged tiger, but Harrigan’s gift—a gift that has also made him an award-winning novelist—is to bring readers closer to such things, to make them less remote, just as a cave painting in the title essay eerily transmits the living stare of a long-extinct mammoth.

Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction Finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction One of NPR's Best Books of 2021 A New York Times Notable Book of 2021 One of TIME's 100 Must-Read Books of 2021 "The scope is sweeping, the writing is beautiful. It’s an epic story worthy of the impact this one case has had on the American psyche." —Michel Martin, NPR "Stupendous…. If you want to understand Roe more deeply before the coming decision, read it." —Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal A masterpiece of reporting on the Supreme Court’s most divisive case, Roe v. Wade, and the unknown lives at its heart. Despite her famous pseudonym, “Jane Roe,” no one knows the truth about Norma McCorvey (1947–2017), whose unwanted pregnancy in 1969 opened a great fracture in American life. Journalist Joshua Prager spent hundreds of hours with Norma, discovered her personal papers—a previously unseen trove—and witnessed her final moments. The Family Roe presents her life in full. Propelled by the crosscurrents of sex and religion, gender and class, it is a life that tells the story of abortion in America. Prager begins that story on the banks of Louisiana’s Atchafalaya River where Norma was born, and where unplanned pregnancies upended generations of her forebears. A pregnancy then upended Norma’s life too, and the Dallas waitress became Jane Roe. Drawing on a decade of research, Prager reveals the woman behind the pseudonym, writing in novelistic detail of her unknown life from her time as a sex worker in Dallas, to her private thoughts on family and abortion, to her dealings with feminist and Christian leaders, to the three daughters she placed for adoption. Prager found those women, including the youngest—Baby Roe—now fifty years old. She shares her story in The Family Roe for the first time, from her tortured interactions with her birth mother, to her emotional first meeting with her sisters, to the burden that was uniquely hers from conception. The Family Roe abounds in such revelations—not only about Norma and her children but about the broader “family” connected to the case. Prager tells the stories of activists and bystanders alike whose lives intertwined with Roe. In particular, he introduces three figures as important as they are unknown: feminist lawyer Linda Coffee, who filed the original Texas lawsuit yet now lives in obscurity; Curtis Boyd, a former fundamentalist Christian, today a leading provider of third-trimester abortions; and Mildred Jefferson, the first black female Harvard Medical School graduate, who became a pro-life leader with great secrets. An epic work spanning fifty years of American history, The Family Roe will change the way you think about our enduring American divide: the right to choose or the right to life.