The Mississippi River Festival

The Mississippi River Festival
Author :
Publisher : Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages : 182
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781439633229
ISBN-13 : 1439633223
Rating : 4/5 (29 Downloads)

Synopsis The Mississippi River Festival by : Amanda Bahr-Evola

In 1969, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville initiated a remarkable performing arts series called the Mississippi River Festival. Over 12 summer seasons, between 1969 and 1980, the festival presented 353 events showcasing performers in a variety of musical genres, including classical, chamber, vocal, ragtime, blues, folk, bluegrass, barbershop, country, and rock, as well as dance and theater. During those years, more than one million visitors flocked to the spacious Gyo Obata-designed campus in the countryside near St. Louis. The Mississippi River Festival began as a partnership promoting regional cooperation in the realm of the performing arts. Southern Illinois University Edwardsville invited the St. Louis Symphony to establish residence on campus and to offer a summer season. To host the symphony, the university created an outdoor concert venue within a natural amphitheater by installing a large circus tent, a stage and acoustic shell, and a sophisticated sound system. To appeal to the widest possible audience, the university included contemporary popular musicians in the series. The audacity of the undertaking, the charm of the venue, the popularity of the artists, the excellence of the performances, and the nostalgic memory of warm summer evenings have combined to endow the festival with legendary status among those who attended.

Paddle for a Purpose

Paddle for a Purpose
Author :
Publisher : eLectio Publishing
Total Pages : 371
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781632134899
ISBN-13 : 1632134896
Rating : 4/5 (99 Downloads)

Synopsis Paddle for a Purpose by : Barb Geiger

"You want to what?" Barb regards her husband with incredulity at the prospect of paddling down the entire length of the mighty Mississippi River in their recently completed tandem kayak. Paddle for a Purpose sweeps the reader into a journey of faith and personal discovery, as Barb and Gene feel called to volunteer with charity organizations in quaint river towns along one of the most scenic and powerful river systems in America. Against a backdrop of picturesque settings and the river's changing moods, exciting and often humorous accounts of adventure and mishap intermingle with inspiring stories of healing, renewal, beauty, compassion and trust in God.

Mississippi Solo

Mississippi Solo
Author :
Publisher : Macmillan
Total Pages : 260
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0805059032
ISBN-13 : 9780805059038
Rating : 4/5 (32 Downloads)

Synopsis Mississippi Solo by : Eddy Harris

The true story of a young black man's quest: to canoe the length of the Mississippi River from Minnesota to New Orleans.

They Called Us River Rats

They Called Us River Rats
Author :
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages : 230
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781496833099
ISBN-13 : 1496833090
Rating : 4/5 (99 Downloads)

Synopsis They Called Us River Rats by : Macon Fry

They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans is the previously untold story of perhaps the oldest outsider settlement in America, an invisible community on the annually flooded shores of the Mississippi River. This community exists in the place between the normal high and low water line of the Mississippi River, a zone known in Louisiana as the batture. For the better part of two centuries, batture dwellers such as Macon Fry have raised shantyboats on stilts, built water-adapted homes, foraged, fished, and survived using the skills a river teaches. Until now the stories of this way of life have existed only in the memories of those who have lived here. Beginning in 2000, Fry set about recording the stories of all the old batture dwellers he could find: maritime workers, willow furniture makers, fishermen, artists, and river shrimpers. Along the way, Fry uncovered fascinating tales of fortune tellers, faith healers, and wild bird trappers who defiantly lived on the river. They Called Us River Rats also explores the troubled relationship between people inside the levees, the often-reviled batture folks, and the river itself. It traces the struggle between batture folks and city authorities, the commercial interests that claimed the river, and Louisiana’s most powerful politicians. These conflicts have ended in legal battles, displacement, incarceration, and even lynching. Today Fry is among the senior generation of “River Rats” living in a vestigial colony of twelve “camps” on New Orleans’s river batture, a fragment of a settlement that once stretched nearly six miles and numbered hundreds of homes. It is the last riparian settlement on the Lower Mississippi and a contrarian, independent life outside urban zoning, planning, and flood protection. This book is for everyone who ever felt the pull of the Mississippi River or saw its towering levees and wondered who could live on the other side.

When the Mississippi Ran Backwards

When the Mississippi Ran Backwards
Author :
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Total Pages : 330
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781416583103
ISBN-13 : 1416583106
Rating : 4/5 (03 Downloads)

Synopsis When the Mississippi Ran Backwards by : Jay Feldman

From Jay Feldmen comes an enlightening work about how the most powerful earthquakes in the history of America united the Indians in one last desperate rebellion, reversed the Mississippi River, revealed a seamy murder in the Jefferson family, and altered the course of the War of 1812. On December 15, 1811, two of Thomas Jefferson's nephews murdered a slave in cold blood and put his body parts into a roaring fire. The evidence would have been destroyed but for a rare act of God—or, as some believed, of the Indian chief Tecumseh. That same day, the Mississippi River's first steamboat, piloted by Nicholas Roosevelt, powered itself toward New Orleans on its maiden voyage. The sky grew hazy and red, and jolts of electricity flashed in the air. A prophecy by Tecumseh was about to be fulfilled. He had warned reluctant warrior-tribes that he would stamp his feet and bring down their houses. Sure enough, between December 16, 1811, and late April 1812, a catastrophic series of earthquakes shook the Mississippi River Valley. Of the more than 2,000 tremors that rumbled across the land during this time, three would have measured nearly or greater than 8.0 on the not-yet-devised Richter Scale. Centered in what is now the bootheel region of Missouri, the New Madrid earthquakes were felt as far away as Canada; New York; New Orleans; Washington, DC; and the western part of the Missouri River. A million and a half square miles were affected as the earth's surface remained in a state of constant motion for nearly four months. Towns were destroyed, an eighteen-mile-long by five-mile-wide lake was created, and even the Mississippi River temporarily ran backwards. The quakes uncovered Jefferson's nephews' cruelty and changed the course of the War of 1812 as well as the future of the new republic. In When the Mississippi Ran Backwards, Jay Feldman expertly weaves together the story of the slave murder, the steamboat, Tecumseh, and the war, and brings a forgotten period back to vivid life. Tecumseh's widely believed prophecy, seemingly fulfilled, hastened an unprecedented alliance among southern and northern tribes, who joined the British in a disastrous fight against the U.S. government. By the end of the war, the continental United States was secure against Britain, France, and Spain; the Indians had lost many lives and much land; and Jefferson's nephews were exposed as murderers. The steamboat, which survived the earthquake, was sunk. When the Mississippi Ran Backwards sheds light on this now-obscure yet pivotal period between the Revolutionary and Civil wars, uncovering the era's dramatic geophysical, political, and military upheavals. Feldman paints a vivid picture of how these powerful earthquakes made an impact on every aspect of frontier life—and why similar catastrophic quakes are guaranteed to recur. When the Mississippi Ran Backwards is popular history at its best.

Forty Days and Forty Nights

Forty Days and Forty Nights
Author :
Publisher : University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Total Pages : 366
Release :
ISBN-10 : 1946160768
ISBN-13 : 9781946160768
Rating : 4/5 (68 Downloads)

Synopsis Forty Days and Forty Nights by : Amber Edwards

"FORTY DAYS AND FORTY NIGHTS is a contemporary thriller set in the Mississippi River Delta. Thirty-nine days of torrential rain have swollen the river to the brink. Clementine Price-a young US Army Corps of Engineers officer born on a farm in the flood-plain of the Arkansas Delta-is battling to protect the people and homeland she loves from a catastrophic flood when she discovers that a richly funded domestic terrorist- hiding in plain sight in a beloved megachurch-has weaponized the natural disaster to inundate America's heartland. His plan to cleave the United States in half and found his own all-white nation is already in motion. Clementine has only hours to mobilize a make-shift army, engineer a strategy to turn nature's overwhelming force back onto the enemy, stop civil war, and save millions from drowning"--

The Control of Nature

The Control of Nature
Author :
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages : 272
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780374708498
ISBN-13 : 0374708495
Rating : 4/5 (98 Downloads)

Synopsis The Control of Nature by : John McPhee

While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) "any struggle against natural forces--heroic or venal, rash or well advised--when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods." His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya--the largest river swamp in North America--and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered and rationed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project called Old River Control. In the natural cycles of the Mississippi's deltaic plain, the time had come for the Mississippi to change course, to shift its mouth more than a hundred miles and go down the Atchafalaya, one of its distributary branches. The United States could not afford that--for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all the industries that lie between would be cut off from river commerce with the rest of the nation. At a place called Old River, the Corps therefore had built a great fortress--part dam, part valve--to restrain the flow of the Atchafalaya and compel the Mississippi to stay where it is. In Iceland, in 1973, an island split open without warning and huge volumes of lava began moving in the direction of a harbor scarcely half a mile away. It was not only Iceland's premier fishing port (accounting for a large percentage of Iceland's export economy) but it was also the only harbor along the nation's southern coast. As the lava threatened to fill the harbor and wipe it out, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock--initiating an all-out endeavor unique in human history. On the big island of Hawaii, one of the world's two must eruptive hot spots, people are not unmindful of the Icelandic example. McPhee went to Hawaii to talk with them and to walk beside the edges of a molten lake and incandescent rivers. Some of the more expensive real estate in Los Angeles is up against mountains that are rising and disintegrating as rapidly as any in the world. After a complex coincidence of natural events, boulders will flow out of these mountains like fish eggs, mixed with mud, sand, and smaller rocks in a cascading mass known as debris flow. Plucking up trees and cars, bursting through doors and windows, filling up houses to their eaves, debris flows threaten the lives of people living in and near Los Angeles' famous canyons. At extraordinary expense the city has built a hundred and fifty stadium-like basins in a daring effort to catch the debris. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.

Mississippi River Festival

Mississippi River Festival
Author :
Publisher : Arcadia Library Editions
Total Pages : 130
Release :
ISBN-10 : 1531624936
ISBN-13 : 9781531624934
Rating : 4/5 (36 Downloads)

Synopsis Mississippi River Festival by : Amanda Bahr-Evola

In 1969, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville initiated a remarkable performing arts series called the Mississippi River Festival. Over 12 summer seasons, between 1969 and 1980, the festival presented 353 events showcasing performers in a variety of musical genres, including classical, chamber, vocal, ragtime, blues, folk, bluegrass, barbershop, country, and rock, as well as dance and theater. During those years, more than one million visitors flocked to the spacious Gyo Obata-designed campus in the countryside near St. Louis. The Mississippi River Festival began as a partnership promoting regional cooperation in the realm of the performing arts. Southern Illinois University Edwardsville invited the St. Louis Symphony to establish residence on campus and to offer a summer season. To host the symphony, the university created an outdoor concert venue within a natural amphitheater by installing a large circus tent, a stage and acoustic shell, and a sophisticated sound system. To appeal to the widest possible audience, the university included contemporary popular musicians in the series. The audacity of the undertaking, the charm of the venue, the popularity of the artists, the excellence of the performances, and the nostalgic memory of warm summer evenings have combined to endow the festival with legendary status among those who attended.

Rising Tide

Rising Tide
Author :
Publisher :
Total Pages : 554
Release :
ISBN-10 : UVA:X004092027
ISBN-13 :
Rating : 4/5 (27 Downloads)

Synopsis Rising Tide by : John M. Barry

The great Mississippi flood of 1927 and how it changed America.

Lansing to LeClaire Travel Guide

Lansing to LeClaire Travel Guide
Author :
Publisher : Dean Klinkenberg
Total Pages : 360
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0971690448
ISBN-13 : 9780971690448
Rating : 4/5 (48 Downloads)

Synopsis Lansing to LeClaire Travel Guide by : Dean Klinkenberg