The Kansas Flint Hills stretch across a dozen counties in the eastern half of the Sunflower State. The region boasts rolling hills covered in native grasses, including the tallgrass varieties unique to the area. Dubbed the "Great American Desert" by pioneers facing the prairie's vastness, the rich grassland became home to settlers pursuing ranching and farming enterprises. Images of America: Flint Hills presents over 200 historic images from a half-dozen counties in the region. Included are vintage photographs from the Native Stone Scenic Byway and the Flint Hills Scenic Byway that transverse the district. Also included are views of Council Grove, the last place that travelers could purchase supplies before leaving on the Santa Fe Trail. The Davis Ranch, which encompassed all of what is now the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, is seen in historic images never published before. The volume concludes with photographs of Flint Hills cowboys at work and at play.

This authoritative catalogue of the Corcoran Gallery of Art's renowned collection of pre-1945 American paintings will greatly enhance scholarly and public understanding of one of the finest and most important collections of historic American art in the world. Composed of more than 600 objects dating from 1740 to 1945.

Claude Wheeler is a young man who was born after the American frontier has vanished. The son of a successful farmer and an intensely pious mother, Wheeler is guaranteed a comfortable livelihood. Nevertheless, Wheeler views himself as a victim of his father's success and his own inexplicable malaise.Thus, devoid of parental and spousal love, Wheeler finds a new purpose to his life in France, a faraway country that only existed for him in maps before the First World War. Will Wheeler ever succeed in his new goal? The novel is inspired from real-life events and also won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923.

"This cheerful little road novel, published in 1919, is about Claire Boltwood, who, in the early days of the 20th century, travels by automobile from New York City to the Pacific Northwest, where she falls in love with a nice, down-to-earth young man and gives up her snobbish Estate."

Tells the story of the infamous “Goat Gland Doctor”—controversial medical charlatan, groundbreaking radio impresario, and prescient political campaigner—and recounts his amazing rags to riches to rags career. A popular joke of the 1920s posed the question, “What’s the fastest thing on four legs?” The punch line? “A goat passing Dr. Brinkley’s hospital!” It seems that John R. Brinkley’s virility rejuvenation cure—transplanting goat gonads into aging men—had taken the nation by storm. Never mind that “Doc” Brinkley’s medical credentials were shaky at best and that he prescribed medication over the airwaves via his high-power radio stations. The man built an empire. The Kansas Medical Board combined with the Federal Radio Commission to revoke Brinkley’s medical and radio licenses, which various courts upheld. Not to be stopped, Brinkley started a write-in campaign for Governor. He received more votes than any other candidate but lost due to invalidated and “misplaced” ballots. Brinkley’s tactics, particularly the use of his radio station and personal airplane, changed political campaigning forever. Brinkley then moved his radio medical practice to Del Rio, Texas, and began operating a “border blaster” on the Mexico side of the Rio Grande. His rogue stations, XER and its successor XERA, eventually broadcast at an antenna-shattering 1,000,000 watts and were not only a haven for Brinkley’s lucrative quackery, but also hosted an unprecedented number of then-unknown country musicians and other guests.

First published in Germany in 1929, The End and the Beginning is a lively personal memoir of a vanished world and of a rebellious, high-spirited young woman's struggle to achieve independence. Born in 1883 into a distinguished and wealthy aristocratic family of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hermynia Zur Muhlen spent much of her childhood travelling in Europe and North Africa with her diplomat father. After five years on her German husband's estate in czarist Russia she broke with both her family and her husband and set out on a precarious career as a professional writer committed to socialism. Besides translating many leading contemporary authors, notably Upton Sinclair, into German, she herself published an impressive number of politically engaged novels, detective stories, short stories, and children's fairy tales. Because of her outspoken opposition to National Socialism, she had to flee her native Austria in 1938 and seek refuge in England, where she died, virtually penniless, in 1951. This revised and corrected translation of Zur Muhlen's memoir - with extensive notes and an essay on the author by Lionel Gossman - will appeal especially to readers interested in women's history, the Central European aristocratic world that came to an end with the First World War, and the culture and politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas | Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize Selected by Time as One of the Ten Best Books of the Year | A New York Times Notable Book | Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post Book World, The Christian Science Monitor, Rocky Mountain News, and Kirkus Reviews | A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist | Winner of the ALA Alex Award | Finalist for the Costa Novel Award From award-winning writer David Mitchell comes a sinewy, meditative novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood and the old on the cusp of the new. Black Swan Green tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the thirteen chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy. A world of Kissingeresque realpolitik enacted in boys’ games on a frozen lake; of “nightcreeping” through the summer backyards of strangers; of the tabloid-fueled thrills of the Falklands War and its human toll; of the cruel, luscious Dawn Madden and her power-hungry boyfriend, Ross Wilcox; of a certain Madame Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, an elderly bohemian emigré who is both more and less than she appears; of Jason’s search to replace his dead grandfather’s irreplaceable smashed watch before the crime is discovered; of first cigarettes, first kisses, first Duran Duran LPs, and first deaths; of Margaret Thatcher’s recession; of Gypsies camping in the woods and the hysteria they inspire; and, even closer to home, of a slow-motion divorce in four seasons. Pointed, funny, profound, left-field, elegiac, and painted with the stuff of life, Black Swan Green is David Mitchell’s subtlest and most effective achievement to date. Praise for Black Swan Green “[David Mitchell has created] one of the most endearing, smart, and funny young narrators ever to rise up from the pages of a novel. . . . The always fresh and brilliant writing will carry readers back to their own childhoods. . . . This enchanting novel makes us remember exactly what it was like.”—The Boston Globe “[David Mitchell is a] prodigiously daring and imaginative young writer. . . . As in the works of Thomas Pynchon and Herman Melville, one feels the roof of the narrative lifted off and oneself in thrall.”—Time