Pack a bag and prepare to go to some of the most interesting places in the 50 states. Learn about each state’s flag, motto, fun fast facts, and more as you fill up your passport crisscrossing the country! From Native American history to how immigration impacted the nation, you will explore some of the sites and stories that make this vast land remarkable. Did You Know: Montgomery, Alabama, was the site of the first citywide electric trolley system in 1886. Tennessee is home to the largest underground lake in the United States, the Lost Sea, discovered by a 13-year-old boy in 1905. Ohio was home to the first professional baseball team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings in 1869. Benny Benson, an orphan, designed Alaska’s distinctive state flag in 1927. Montana’s Triple Divide Peak in Glacier National Park is the only place in North America that allows water to flow in three directions — the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, and Hudson Bay. Texas is the only state to have flags of six different countries fly over it, and it was an independent nation from 1836 to 1846.

In today's world of constant identification checks, it's difficult to recall that there was ever a time when "proof of identity" was not a part of everyday life. And as anyone knows who has ever lost a passport, or let one expire on the eve of international travel, the passport has become an indispensable document. But how and why did this form of identification take on such a crucial role? In the first history of the passport in the United States, Craig Robertson offers an illuminating account of how this document, above all others, came to be considered a reliable answer to the question: who are you? Historically, the passport originated as an official letter of introduction addressed to foreign governments on behalf of American travelers, but as Robertson shows, it became entangled in contemporary negotiations over citizenship and other forms of identity documentation. Prior to World War I, passports were not required to cross American borders, and while some people struggled to understand how a passport could accurately identify a person, others took advantage of this new document to advance claims for citizenship. From the strategic use of passport applications by freed slaves and a campaign to allow married women to get passports in their maiden names, to the "passport nuisance" of the 1920s and the contested addition of photographs and other identification technologies on the passport, Robertson sheds new light on issues of individual and national identity in modern U.S. history. In this age of heightened security, especially at international borders, Robertson's The Passport in America provides anyone interested in questions of identification and surveillance with a richly detailed, and often surprising, history of this uniquely important document.

It's here! Now you can stamp your way through the entire National Park System with the newest addition to the Passport To Your National Parks line of products: the Collector's Edition Passport. Beauty and practicality meet artfully in this deluxe version of the popular Passport, taking you above and beyond the original by providing space for Passport stickers and cancellation stamps for every single park, as well as space for extra cancellations. The park sites are color-coded by region, each area featuring a color map that pinpoints park locations. With a spiral binding that makes it easy to lie open flat, a hard cover that ensures durability and longer life, and pages graced with beautiful color photographs, it's the ultimate stamping ground.

Travel the World in the Comfort of Your Own Home Here is an out-of-the-ordinary geographic journey of 26 language groups from Armenian to Zulu! Discover various cultures and customs, fill up your passport with stickers from the countries you visit, and learn that children from around the world are often a lot like you! Did you know: • The language journey began just over 4,000 years ago at the Tower of Babel. • There is a huge slab of limestone in Bolivia that has some 5,000 dinosaur footprints. • A traditional Christmas Eve dinner in Lithuania includes 12 dishes, one for each of the Apostles. • All Bengali literature was rhymed verse if written before the 19th century. Passport to the Worldhelps you encounter people and places all over the world, including facts about countries, their capital cities, maps, flags, populations, and religions. This is a fun and fact-filled adventure you can share with others through interactive games included in the back of this book and in your very own passport. Now, grab your passport and get ready, steady, and go! Winner of the USA Book News “Best Books 2011” Awards in the ‘Children’s Religious’ Category

This is the story of an illustrious Romanian-born, Hungarian-speaking, Vienna-schooled, Columbia-educated and Harvard-formed, middle-class Jewish professor of politics and other subjects. Markovits revels in a rootlessness that offers him comfort, succor, and the inspiration for his life’s work. As we follow his quest to find a home, we encounter his engagement with the important political, social, and cultural developments of five decades on two continents. We also learn about his musical preferences, from classical to rock; his love of team sports such as soccer, baseball, basketball, and American football; and his devotion to dogs and their rescue. Above all, the book analyzes the travails of emigration the author experienced twice, moving from Romania to Vienna and then from Vienna to New York. Markovits’s Candide-like travels through the ups and downs of post-1945 Europe and America offer a panoramic view of key currents that shaped the second half of the twentieth century. By shedding light on the cultural similarities and differences between both continents, the book shows why America fascinated Europeans like Markovits and offered them a home that Europe never did: academic excellence, intellectual openness, cultural diversity and religious tolerance. America for Markovits was indeed the “beacon on the hill,” despite the ugliness of its racism, the prominence of its everyday bigotry, the severity of its growing economic inequality, and the presence of other aspects that mar this worthy experiment’s daily existence.

Takes readers on a journey back in time in order to experience life during the Civil War, describing clothing, accommodations, foods, local customs, transportation, a few notable personalities, and more.

An ethnographic exploration of the meaning of national citizenship in the context of globalization The American Passport in Turkey explores the diverse meanings and values that people outside of the United States attribute to U.S. citizenship, specifically those who possess or seek to obtain U.S. citizenship while residing in Turkey. Özlem Altan-Olcay and Evren Balta interviewed more than one hundred individuals and families and, through their narratives, shed light on how U.S. citizenship is imagined, experienced, and practiced in a setting where everyday life is marked by numerous uncertainties and unequal opportunities. When a Turkish mother wants to protect her daughter's modern, secular upbringing through U.S. citizenship, U.S. citizenship, for her, is a form of insurance for her daughter given Turkey's unknown political future. When a Turkish-American citizen describes how he can make a credible claim of national belonging because he returned to Turkey yet can also claim a cosmopolitan Western identity because of his U.S. citizenship, he represents the popular identification of the West with the United States. And when a natural-born U.S. citizen describes with enthusiasm the upward mobility she has experienced since moving to Turkey, she reveals how the status of U.S. citizenship and "Americanness" become valuable assets outside of the States. Offering a corrective to citizenship studies where discussions of inequality are largely limited to domestic frames, Altan-Olcay and Balta argue that the relationship between inequality and citizenship regimes can only be fully understood if considered transnationally. Additionally, The American Passport in Turkey demonstrates that U.S. global power not only reveals itself in terms of foreign policy but also manifests in the active desires people have for U.S. citizenship, even when they do not intend to live in the United States. These citizens, according to the authors, create a new kind of empire with borders and citizen-state relations that do not map onto recognizable political territories.

A provocative examination of how new realities of religion and migration are subtly challenging the very definition of what it means to be an American. Sociology professor Levitt argues that immigrants no longer trade one membership card for another, but stay close to their home countries, indelibly altering American religion and values with experiences and beliefs imported from Asia, Latin America and Africa. The book is a pointed response to Samuel Huntington's famous clash of civilisations thesis and looks at global religions' organisation for the first time.

An unforgettable graphic memoir by debut talent Sophia Glock reveals her discovery as a teenager that her parents are agents working for the CIA. Young Sophia has lived in so many different countries, she can barely keep count. Stationed now with her family in Central America because of her parents' work, Sophia feels displaced as an American living abroad, when she has hardly spent any of her life in America. Everything changes when she reads a letter she was never meant to see and uncovers her parents' secret. They are not who they say they are. They are working for the CIA. As Sophia tries to make sense of this news, and the web of lies surrounding her, she begins to question everything. The impact that this has on Sophia's emerging sense of self and understanding of the world makes for a page-turning exploration of lies and double lives. In the hands of this extraordinary graphic storyteller, this astonishing true story bursts to life.