Nineteen-year-old Burmah Adams, a hairdresser and former Santa Ana High School student, spent her honeymoon on a crime spree. She and her husband of less than one week, White, an ex-con, robbed at least twenty people in and around downtown L.A. at gunpoint over an eight-week period. But the worst of their crimes was the shooting of a popular elementary school teacher, Cora Withington, and a former publisher, Crombie Allen, who was teaching her how to drive his new car. A few days later, a watchful pair of patrolmen in a Westlake neighborhood called their detective colleagues at the Los Angeles Police Department; they had spotted a car that looked like one the duo had stolen days before. Two of these detectives dressed as mechanics and kept an eye on the apartment building until Burmah and Thomas appeared one afternoon. As police swarmed the building, Burmah tried to hurl herself out of a third–story window, while Thomas shot at officers and was immediately gunned down and killed. Blond Rattlesnake reveals the events that brought Adams and White together and details the crime spree they committed in the sweltering hot days and nights of Los Angeles in the height of the Great Depression. It describes the terror of citizens in their path and the outrage they directed at the female half of the duo. Politicians exploited Burmah’s incarceration and trial for their own purposes as the press battled for scoops about the “Blonde Rattlesnake” and created sensation while trying to make sense of her crimes.

A pioneer woman educator in the male-dominated world of nineteenth-century academia, Mary Rippon was the first female professor at the University of Colorado and is believed to have been the first woman in the United States to teach at a state university. Mary received wide acclaim for her teaching, but Victorian society forced her to lead two very separate lives. "Miss Rippon," as she was always known, was both a professional woman and a mother in an era when these two roles could not be combined. To keep her job and provide for her family, she hid her husband and child behind a Victorian veil of secrecy that spanned two continents. Separate Lives reveals the full story of the conflicts between this extraordinary woman’s public and private lives. In January 1878, after several years of education in Germany, France, and Switzerland, the soft-spoken twenty-seven-year-old was welcomed at the newly opened University of Colorado in the then-small frontier town of Boulder. The growth of her lengthy career paralleled the early growth of the university, where she worked her way up from first female faculty member to the university's first female professor, eventually chairing the Department of German Language and Literature. The truth of Mary’s separate lives was not disclosed until nearly a century later, in 1976, when her elderly grandson revealed to a university librarian that he was Mary’s descendant. In 2006, Mary received a posthumous honorary degree from the University of Colorado, and in 2020 a scholarship was endowed in her name. Silvia Pettem’s carefully researched biography weaves together the story of Mary’s private life with her professional career—not to tarnish Mary's well-deserved reputation, but rather to uncover the human side of a woman whose circumstances clashed with the mores of her times.

Some things you just can't say, even to your parents. "Dad, did you ever want to be a mermaid?" Nope. Don't say it. Not if you're a boy. You gotta keep it inside. Maybe thirteen-year-old Todd Winslow is the best diver at summer camp. If only diving could save him. Underwater is a much kinder world, a secret mermaid world that no one else can know about - not Dad, and definitely not Brad, the camp's numero uno bad boy. Todd tries to fit in, playing nice with flirty model-wannabe Sylvie and shunning nature-nerd Olivia - but you can only fool people for so long. Brad is watching every move, ready to expose all that's different about Todd. Then there's the doll thing. And Dad finds out. How will Todd survive now? PRAISE FOR IF YOU BELIEVE IN MERMAIDS.DON'T TELL ."A welcome and courageous book that speaks out for young people to be true to who they are." -Alex Sanchez, author of Rainbow Boys and So Hard to Say "Finally-a kid-friendly middle-grade novel that disputes the myth that there is just one way of being a boy." -Catherine Tuerk, M.A., R.N., C.S., Nurse Psychotherapist " ... A refreshing look into the heart of a great kid who views the world through a slightly different lens." -Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson, author of Target, The Parallel Universe of Liars, and Gone After winning the kindergarten jumping-rope contest, A. A. Philips grew up to become a writer, therapist, and teacher of literature with degrees from Middlebury, Harvard, and the University of Southern Maine.

An engaging account of the uniquely creative spirit and bustling cultural ecology of contemporary Los Angeles How did Los Angeles start the 20th century as a dusty frontier town and end up a century later as one of the globe's supercities - with unparalleled cultural, economic, and technological reach? In City at the Edge of Forever, Peter Lunenfeld constructs an urban portrait, layer by layer, from serendipitous affinities, historical anomalies, and uncanny correspondences. In its pages, modernist architecture and lifestyle capitalism come together via a surfer girl named Gidget; Joan Didion's yellow Corvette is the brainchild of a car-crazy Japanese-American kid interned at Manzanar; and the music of the Manson Family segues into the birth of sci-fi fandom. One of the book's innovations is to brand Los Angeles as the alchemical city. Earth became real estate when the Yankees took control in the nineteenth century. Fire fueled the city's early explosive growth as the Southland's oil fields supplied the inexhaustible demands of drivers and their cars. Air defined the area from WWII to the end of the Cold War, with aeronautics and aerospace dominating the region's industries. Water is now the key element, and Southern California's ports are the largest in the western hemisphere. What alchemists identify as the ethereal fifth element, or quintessence, this book positions as the glamour of Hollywood, a spell that sustains the city but also needs to be broken in order to understand Los Angeles now. Lunenfeld weaves together the city's art, architecture, and design, juxtaposes its entertainment and literary histories, and moves from restaurant kitchens to recording studios to ultra-secret research and development labs. In the process, he reimagines Los Angeles as simultaneously an exemplar and cautionary tale for the 21st century.

In 1950, facing artistic and legal persecution by Senator Joe McCarthy because of her inclusion on Louis Budenz’s list of four hundred concealed communists, single mother Hannah Weinstein fled to Europe. There, she built a television studio and established her own production company, Sapphire Films, then surreptitiously hired scores of such blacklisted writers as Waldo Salt, Ian McLellan Hunter, Adrian Scott, and Ring Lardner Jr., and “Trojan-horsed” democratic ideals back to the United States through more than three hundred half-hours of programming, making a fortune in the process. With the exception of a French producer, no other woman on the continent was creating television content at this time, and Weinstein was the only one who was head of her own studio. Before she became one of the more powerful independent production forces in 1950s British television, Hannah Weinstein had a distinguished career as a journalist, publicist, and left-wing political activist. She worked for the New York Herald Tribune from 1927, then began a career in politics when she joined Fiorello H. La Guardia’s New York mayoral campaign in 1937. She also organized the press side of the presidential campaigns of Franklin D. Roosevelt and later (in 1948) of Henry Wallace. Using declassified FBI and CIA files, interviews, and the personal papers of blacklisted writers and other sources, Red Sapphire depicts how for the better part of a decade, Weinstein was a leader in the Left’s battle with the Right to shape popular culture during the Cold War . . . a battle that she eventually won.

"An Account of the Campaign inside the West Indies, in the Year 1794" with the aid of Cooper Willyams is a historic masterpiece that vividly chronicles a pivotal military marketing campaign all through the past due 18th century. The book gives an in depth and insightful narrative of the activities that spread out for the duration of this large period of struggle inside the Caribbean. Cooper Willyams, an astute observer and participant within the campaign, gives readers a first-hand perspective of the army moves, techniques, and the overall surroundings inside the West Indies. His paintings serves as a precious ancient file, taking pictures the essence of the instances with meticulous detail. Willyams' account not only focuses on the military components however also delves into the wider context, encompassing the challenges, hardships, and the impact of the marketing campaign at the neighborhood populations. The author's vivid descriptions and narrative capabilities make this historic work enticing and informative. As a primary source, "An Account of the Campaign inside the West Indies" is quite seemed with the aid of historians and researchers, offering a complete view of the army, social, and political dynamics of the era. Cooper Willyams' contribution to documenting this bankruptcy in history ensures that the activities, people, and the legacy of the 1794 campaign stay remembered and understood.