The Belen Cutoff gave the AT&SF Railway a legitimate transcontinental freight line by eliminating the steep grades of Raton Pass. The Cutoff also transformed the eastern plains of New Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century, leading to New Mexico's most significant population increase as many homesteaders came to the region. This book tells that story by providing the perspectives of the AT&SF balanced by the experiences and narratives of railroad workers, homesteaders, and others. New research includes detailed consideration of internal railroad documents, local newspapers, and extensive oral-history interviews. As a result, this is the definitive account of the Belen Cutoff and provides a more complete and nuanced history of the region and the AT&SF Railway in New Mexico.

Sigrid Anderson focuses on the Southern California magazine Land of Sunshine, a publication that featured authors such as Edith Eaton, Mary Austin, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, to explore how regional periodical fiction offered agency to women--and the implications for the region and its populace.

Florida is a story of astonishing growth, a state swelling from 500,000 residents at the outset of the 20th century to some 16 million at the end. As recently as mid-century, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, Florida was the smallest state in the South. At the dawn of the millennium, it is the fourth largest in the country, a megastate that was among those introducing new words into the American vernacular: space coast, climate control, growth management, retirement community, theme park, edge cities, shopping mall, boomburbs, beach renourishment, Interstate, and Internet. Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams attempts to understand the firestorm of change that erupted into modern Florida by examining the great social, cultural, and economic forces driving its transformation. Gary Mormino ranges far and wide across the landscape and boundaries of a place that is at once America's southernmost state and the northernmost outpost of the Caribbean. From the capital, Tallahassee--a day's walk from the Georgia border--to Miami--a city distant but tantalizingly close to Cuba and Haiti--Mormino traces the themes of Florida's transformation: the echoes of old Dixie and a vanishing Florida; land booms and tourist empires; revolutions in agriculture, technology, and demographics; the seductions of the beach and the dynamics of a graying population; and the enduring but changing meanings of a dreamstate. Beneath the iconography of popular culture is revealed a complex and complicated social framework that reflects a dizzying passage from New Spain to Old South, New South to Sunbelt.

Nagaland :The Land of Sunshine Kiranshankar Maitra There are perhaps many a books written on Nagaland, but “Nagaland : The land of Sunshine” is not just yet another addition to that list . This particular volume presents a comprehensive picture of present day Nagaland with its historical description and various Naga tribes, their customs, rites and rituals, social systems, head-hunting, marriage and moral, arts and crafts, dialects, status of women in society, underground rebel Nagas and emergence of the NSCN, strife, modern Nagas with sunlight and shade, folk songs and tales, laying special emphasis on their colourful festivals which still today vibrate the hills and forests and vigourous, yet intrinsic qualities, despite the foreign missionaries injecting the spirit of their gospel among the people. The author who had been in Nagaland for a long time and travelled extensively, gathered an intimate knowledge about myriad tribes, gives a graphic description with a unique and exquisitely interesting style.

Fifty years ago, David Wedd was a young army officer in West Africas Gold Coast, when that country became Ghana, the first black African colony to gain independence from British rule. In an account that is by turns exciting, funny and poignant, he depicts the changeover from the inside. His lively portrait of the emerging nation introduces us to a whole gallery of characters: the European and African soldiers in his Battalion; traders and market women; religious leaders and witch-doctors; sportsmen, teachers and musicians; and political leaders, including Ghanas first Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah. He tells of his work as an intelligence officer in the new nation and his exploration of the rain forest with its exotic scenery and wildlife, and he shares with us his journey north, through Burkina Faso and Mali to the Sahara Desert and the old town of Timbuktu. Throughout these pages his love of West Africa, with its varied landscapes and above all its exuberant people, is inescapable.