Terrance Keenan employs a unique and fresh approach to historical narrative. His prudent use of a rich collection of family documents elevates the genre to new levels of interest, reflection, and scholarship. The result is a remarkably palpable, highly accessible, and intellectually provocative reconstruction of lives lived in epochs past.Spanning a period of eighty years, the book depicts a nineteenth century New York family grappling with shifting mores, civil war, and vast change in technology, transport, culture, education, and even regional landscape. In firsthand, sometimes intimate, accounts these frontier people, business entrepreneurs—men, women and children—tell who they were, where their travels took them, what went on in their hearts and minds, and how they were affected by historical forces greater than themselves. Carefully edited diaries, letters, and journals show how greed and betrayal,trial and triumph, and star-crossed romance informed the emotional and material fortunes of the Collin/Knapp families. Here are true stories of generational conflict human relations and accomplishment shaped by time, place, custom, and kinship. This revealing, vital work will be a fulsome and entertaining experience for the general reader as well as an invaluable asset to students of American cultural history, frontier life and culture, American diaries and letters as literature, modernization, and historiography.

In The March of Spare Time, Susan Currell explores how and why leisure became an object of such intense interest, concern, and surveillance during the Great Depression. As Americans experienced record high levels of unemployment, leisure was thought by reformers, policy makers, social scientists, physicians, labor unions, and even artists to be both a cause of and a solution to society's most entrenched ills. Of all the problems that faced America in the 1930s, only leisure seemed to offer a panacea for the rest. The problem centered on divided opinions over what constituted proper versus improper use of leisure time. On the one hand, sociologists and reformers excoriated as improper such leisure activities as gambling, loafing, and drinking. On the other, the Works Progress Administration and the newly professionalized recreation experts promoted proper leisure activities such as reading, sports, and arts and crafts. Such attention gave rise to new ideas about how Americans should spend their free time to better themselves and their nation. These ideas were propagated in social science publications and proliferated into the wider cultural sphere. Films, fiction, and radio also engaged with new ideas about leisure, more extensively than has previously been recognized. In examining this wide spectrum of opinion, Currell offers the first full-scale account of the fears and hopes surrounding leisure in the 1930s, one that will be an important addition to the cultural history of the period.

Now with bonus journaling space! A twenty-day prayerful walk to spiritual well-being from the author of the bestsellers The Power of a Praying Wife and The Power of a Praying Parent. Praying God’s Will for Your Life is not a book about finding the right person to marry or deciding on a career. It is a book about a way of life and a heart attitude that are God’s will for everyone who knows Him. That way of life encompasses three important components: An intimate relationship with God A solid foundation in God’s truth A commitment to obedience As she has in previous bestselling books—The Power of a Praying Wife and The Power of a Praying Parent—Stormie invites you to discover the power of prayer, this time encouraging you to pray for yourself as you deepen your walk with God. Accept her challenge to pray for yourself in these areas every day for twenty days, and watch how God changes your life as you move into the center of His will. As you experience the power of God's will in your daily faith journey, take advantage of the bonus Prayer Journal, which offers Stormie's own words of encouragement and plenty of space for reflection and listing prayer requests and answered prayers.