This is a new release of the original 1946 edition.

From a Sports Illustrated senior writer, “a richly detailed history of Aliquippa football . . . A remarkable story of urban struggle and athletic prowess” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). In the early twentieth century, down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, the Jones & Laughlin Steel Company built one of the largest mills in the world and a town to go with it. Aliquippa was a beacon and a melting pot, pulling in thousands of families from Europe and the Jim Crow South. The J&L mill, though dirty and dangerous, offered a chance at a better life. It produced the steel that built American cities and won World War II and even became something of a workers’ paradise. But then, in the 1980s, the steel industry cratered. The mill closed. Crime rose and crack hit big. But another industry grew in Aliquippa. The town didn’t just make steel; it made elite football players, from Mike Ditka to Ty Law to Darrelle Revis. Few places churned out talent like Aliquippa, a town not far from the birthplace of professional football in western Pennsylvania. Despite its troubles—maybe even because of them—Aliquippa became legendary for producing football greatness. A masterpiece of narrative journalism, Playing Through the Whistle tells the remarkable story of Aliquippa and through it, the larger history of American industry, sports, and life. Like football, it will make you marvel, wince, cry, and cheer. “Looks at the struggling steel town of Aliquippa, Pa., through the prism of its high school football team. The author understands the Rust Belt particulars of the region better than most political professionals.” —The Wall Street Journal

Farewell to Prosperity is a provocative, in-depth study of the Liberal and Conservative forces that fought each other to shape American political culture and character during the nation’s most prosperous years. The tome’s central theme is the bitter struggle to fashion post–World War II society between a historic Protestant Ethic that equated free-market economics and money-making with Godliness and a new, secular Liberal temperament that emerged from the twin ordeals of depression and world war to stress social justice and security. Liberal policies and programs after 1945 proved key to the creation of mass affluence while encouraging disadvantaged racial, ethnic, and social groups to seek equal access to power. But liberalism proved a zero-sum game to millions of others who felt their sense of place and self progressively unhinged. Where it did not overturn traditional social relationships and assumptions, liberalism threatened and, in the late sixties and early seventies, fostered new forces of expression at radical odds with the mindset and customs that had previously defined the nation without much question. When the forces of liberalism overreached, the Protestant Ethic and its millions of estranged religious and economic proponents staged a massive comeback under the aegis of Ronald Reagan and a revived Republican Party. The financial hubris, miscalculations, and follies that followed ultimately created a conservative overreach from which the nation is still recovering. Post–World War II America was thus marked by what writer Salman Rushdie labeled in another context “thin-skinned years of rage-defined identity politics.” This “politics” and its meaning form the core of the narrative. Farewell to Prosperity is no partisan screed enlisting recent history to support one side or another. Although absurdity abounds, it knows no home, affecting Conservative and Liberal actors and thinkers alike.

Despite the enduring popular image of the blitzkrieg of World War II, the German Army always depended on horses. It could not have waged war without them. While the Army’s reliance on draft horses to pull artillery, supply wagons, and field kitchens is now generally acknowledged, D. R. Dorondo’s Riders of the Apocalypse examines the history of the German cavalry, a combat arm that not only survived World War I but also rode to war again in 1939. Though concentrating on the period between 1939 and 1945, the book places that history firmly within the larger context of the mounted arm’s development from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to the Third Reich’s surrender. Driven by both internal and external constraints to retain mounted forces after 1918, the German Army effectively did nothing to reduce, much less eliminate, the preponderance of non-mechanized formations during its breakneck expansion under the Nazis after 1933. Instead, politicized command decisions, technical insufficiency, industrial bottlenecks, and, finally, wartime attrition meant that Army leaders were compelled to rely on a steadily growing number of combat horsemen throughout World War II. These horsemen were best represented by the 1st Cavalry Brigade (later Division) which saw combat in Poland, the Netherlands, France, Russia, and Hungary. Their service, however, came to be cruelly dishonored by the horsemen of the 8th Waffen-SS Cavalry Division, a unit whose troopers spent more time killing civilians than fighting enemy soldiers. Throughout the story of these formations, and drawing extensively on both primary and secondary sources, Dorondo shows how the cavalry’s tradition carried on in a German and European world undergoing rapid military industrialization after the mid-nineteenth century. And though Riders of the Apocalypse focuses on the German element of this tradition, it also notes other countries’ continuing (and, in the case of Russia, much more extensive) use of combat horsemen after 1900. However, precisely because the Nazi regime devoted so much effort to portray Germany’s armed forces as fully modern and mechanized, the combat effectiveness of so many German horsemen on the battlefields of Europe until 1945 remains a story that deserves to be more widely known. Dorondo’s work does much to tell that story.

Kevin Gaffney of St. Charles, is pleased to announce his book entitled, While They Were Young-A History of St. Charles and Her Service Personnel 1940-1945. After more than two years of research and writing, Kevin is pleased with the final product that includes 2 DVDs of additional photos. The book includes a history of St. Charles from 1940 including contributions of the citizenry prior and during WWII, the personal accounts of many soldiers and service personnel, letters from the front, and information pertaining to those wounded in action and those who paid the ultimate sacrifice. The book will be available for sale at the St. Charles Heritage Center (630-584-6967) starting January 23, 2010 with a portion of the sales being donated to the Center by the author. The author will be conducting book signings and donating a copy of the book and DVD to the St. Charles Heritage Center, St. Charles Library and to at least two families of veterans. The price of the book is as follows: hardcover $32.95, soft cover $22.95, e-book $6.00. The DVDs are $10.00 per DVD. Kevin currently works as an adjunct professor of criminology at Judson University and for the Office of Regional Counsel, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. His government experience also included work for the U.S. Department of Justice, Criminal Unit in Chicago and the CFTC, Enforcement Division, in Washington, DC. He has taught U.S. History at two Christian high schools. He received his BA in political science from Stetson University and his MPA in public administration from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Kevin also has recorded professionally two CDs of trumpet music. Sony Music has included his version of the Star Spangled Banner in its recording selection, "Bonds Listen to This". Kevin serves on the St. Charles Heritage Board of Directors as Vice-President and also with the St. Charles Park Foundation. He has a passion to tell the stories of service personnel from not only WWII, but of other wars as they relate to St. Charles. Kevin currently resides with his family in St. Charles, Illinois, where he was born. His next book, to be published in the near distant future, will tell the story of St. Charles and her service personnel during WWI. He is also compiling additional material of WWII letters that will compliment the current title in another book also to be available next year. Requests for book signings and presentations pertaining to the book may be made by calling Kevin at 630-584-4797.

This family genealogy history traces the Wilson male line from Daniel Wilson b abt 1748 in Virginia to Nathaniel who migrated to KY about 1800 to James Wilson who came to Scott County in 1840. It then chronicles the Scott County Wilsons thru 2016. It includes a description of their life in the various venues especially the author's, who grew up in Alsey from 1947 to 1970. It is accurately researched.