NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "James and Deborah Fallows have always moved to where history is being made.... They have an excellent sense of where world-shaping events are taking place at any moment" —The New York Times • The basis for the HBO documentary streaming on HBO Max For five years, James and Deborah Fallows have travelled across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting dozens of towns, the America they saw is acutely conscious of its problems—from economic dislocation to the opioid scourge—but it is also crafting solutions, with a practical-minded determination at dramatic odds with the bitter paralysis of national politics. At times of dysfunction on a national level, reform possibilities have often arisen from the local level. The Fallowses describe America in the middle of one of these creative waves. Their view of the country is as complex and contradictory as America itself, but it also reflects the energy, the generosity and compassion, the dreams, and the determination of many who are in the midst of making things better. Our Towns is the story of their journey—and an account of a country busy remaking itself.

Cleburne County and Its Peopleis a historical account of Cleburne County and the men and women who made it what it is today. These men and women were as diverse as the Ozark Mountain's rock-laden landscapes. The pioneers who settled Cleburne County were as strong as the land, of hardy pioneer stock, and bold in thought and action. They were shrewd, strong-willed individuals who brought staunch beliefs and strong disciplines with them and settled in an untamed wilderness which became Cleburne County. Cleburne County and Its Peoplehas drawn from the past and the present--chronicling the lives of settlers facing hardships and tragedies, discovering profound beauty, mastering vast natural resources, and formulating democratic ideals. The stories in this book are honest interpretations of the human experience intertwined with the old and the new and adding exciting dimensions to the county and Cleburne and the state of Arkansas. The objective of Carl J. Barger, the compilerofCleburne County and Its People, is to preserve a history of the county of his birth for students, historians, and all of the citizens of Cleburne County. Carl J. Barger is the author of Swords and Plowshares, a Civil War love story, and Mamie, an Ozark Mountain Girl of Courage, a story of the Ozark Mountain People, set in Cleburne and Van Buren Counties.

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“Nothing short of a masterpiece.” —NPR Books A New York Times Bestseller and a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation. Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review), Jill Lepore’s one-volume history of America places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas—“these truths,” Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise? These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. “A nation born in contradiction… will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history,” Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.