In 1845, an estimated 2,500 emigrants left Independence and St. Joseph, Missouri, for the Willamette Valley in what was soon to become the Oregon Territory. It was general knowledge that the route of the Oregon Trail through the Blue Mountains and down the Columbia River to The Dalles was grueling and dangerous. About 1,200 men, women, and children in over two hundred wagons accepted fur trapper and guide Stephen Meek's offer to lead them on a shortcut across the trackless high desert of eastern Oregon. Those who followed Meek experienced a terrible ordeal when his memory of the terrain apparently failed. Lost for weeks with little or no water and a shortage of food, the Overlanders encountered deep dust, alkali lakes, and steep, rocky terrain. Many became ill and some died in the forty days it took to travel from the Snake River in present-day Idaho to the Deschutes River near Bend, Oregon. Stories persist that children in the group found gold nuggets in a small, dry creek bed along the way. From 2006 to 2011, Brooks Ragan and a team of specialists in history, geology, global positioning, metal detecting, and aerial photography spent weeks every spring and summer tracing the Meek Cutoff. They located wagon ruts, gravesites, and other physical evidence from the most difficult part of the trail, from Vale, Oregon, to the upper reaches of the Crooked River and to a location near Redmond where a section of the train reached the Deschutes. The Meek Cutoff moves readers back and forth in time, using surviving journals from members of the 1845 party, detailed day-to-day maps, aerial photographs, and descriptions of the modern-day exploration to document an extraordinary story of the Oregon Trail.

Researchers James H. and Theona J. Hambleton relate the history of the Meek Cutoff through the words of the diarists that lived through the ordeal. Included in the book are 53 USGS Quadrangle maps showing the actual trail location and many color photos of the remains of the trail itself.

Lovisa King, 17, comes of age on the Oregon Trail and finds the strength to help her family survive a deadly shortcut on their journey to the Willamette Valley.

"Freebird is such a timely book. considering the current deep divisions between right and left. A new classic for the collapsing political landscape of America."--Kim Gordon, author of Girl in a Band The Singers, an all-American family in the California style, are about to lose everything. Anne is a bureaucrat in the Los Angeles Office of Sustainability whose ideals are compromised by a proposal from a venture capitalist seeking to privatize the city’s wastewater. Her brother, Ben, a former Navy SEAL, returns from Afghanistan disillusioned and struggling with PTSD, and starts down a path toward a radical act of violence. And Anne’s teenage son, Aaron, can’t decide if he should go to college or pitch it all and hit the road. They all live inside the long shadow of the Singer patriarch Grandpa Sam, whose untold experience of the Holocaust shapes his family’s moral character to the core. Jon Raymond, screenwriter of the acclaimed films Meek’s Cutoff and Night Moves, combines these narrative threads into a hard-driving story of one family’s moral crisis. In Freebird, Raymond delivers a brilliant, searching novel about death and politics in America today, revealing how the fates of our families are irrevocably tied to the currents of history.

Damon and his girlfriend Amy have had enough of Los Angeles. Fitful and tired and dreaming of a simpler life, they leave the city to go work on a community farm. But they've scarcely arrived when their vague hopes start to come unraveled: What are they really doing here? Who are their friends? Are they truly testing themselves, or are they just chasing a fantasy that will never be fulfilled? By degrees, they realize that their dreams are not the same. For Damon, a career in the field of branding unfolds almost effortlessly, while for Amy, the menial labor of the farm leads to a satisfying but difficult new path. As the rift deepens, they are forced to evaluate fundamental questions of identity and fate, ambition and betrayal, compromise and lust. This novel is a fresh, searching story about the love of work and the work of love, and the life destinies that we sadly only recognize in retrospect.

1919, Siberia . . . Deep in the unforgiving landscape a town lies under military rule, awaiting the remorseless assault of Bolsheviks along the Trans-Siberian railway. One night a stranger, Samarin, appears from the woods with a tale of escape from an Arctic prison, insisting a cannibal is on his trail. Only Anna, a beautiful young widow, trusts his story. When a local shaman is found dead suspicion and terror engulf the isolated community, which harbours a secret of its own . . .

In 1853, a wagon train camped in the Eastern Oregon desert 130 miles from the Oregon Trail. Uncertain of their whereabouts and in desperate need of supplies, they sent a scouting party over the mountains for help. This is the true story of Elijah Elliott's "Advance Party." Becoming lost in the Three Sisters Wilderness, they tell their own story of starvation and loyalty through two parallel diaries. The Lost Rescue includes a history of Oregon's lost wagon trains. In 1845, 1,050 men, women and children followed Stephen Meek into the wilderness because of threats made by the Walla Walla and Cayuse Indians. Seeking a short-cut across the Eastern Oregon desert, they faced a mysterious illness as they forged a new path through the desert. In 1853, Elijah Elliott attempted to lead a large group on the same cutoff. After a costly wrong turn, he found himself at the end of a rope while an angry mob weighed his fate. As they journeyed west, the starving train made own way across the desert, facing hunger and intense thirst. In an act of desperation, the emigrants set their animals free and followed them to the distant waters of the Deschutes River.

Brazil has long been called the "country of the future." This book documents an exhibition that examines Brazil from the perspective of blindness as a critical category, a metaphor for the way in which the obstruction of perception can illuminate alternate modes of knowledge and experience. It features twenty emerging and mid-career artists working in Brazil who offer a critical perspective on processes of transition within contemporary society, be it from the public space of the street to the virtual zone of the computer screen, or the scale of local communities to the structure of large-scale political action. These works speak to the complexity and heterogeneity of an art milieu that is both tied to the local and manifestly global in reach.

A carefully curated selection of new and classic essays by Scottish Enlightenment expert Christopher J. Berry