James Patrick Lyons abandoned his family for a life on Kansas City’s skid row. A town drunk, he was arrested eighty times for public intoxication. On the night of his last arrest, he was taken to the city jail and held in solitary confinement. The next morning he was dead. Officials said it was natural causes—yet they could not explain his broken neck. When Richard Serrano learned of the grandfather he had never known, the longtime journalist embarked upon a search that led him deep into the city’s wide-open and ignoble past. He stumbled upon his maternal grandfather’s death certificate from 1948 and discovered that the evidence pointed to murder in that basement cell. That revelation triggered a blizzard of questions for Serrano and provided the impetus for this engrossing story. Part memoir, part historical mystery, My Grandfather’s Prison takes readers back to a crossroads year for Kansas City. The Great Depression and World War II were over, yet vestiges still lingered from the corrupt Pendergast political machine. The city jail itself was a throwback to the old lockups and rock piles of popular fiction, while the sheriff’s office was dishonest and inept—and tried to cover up the death. Much has been written about Tom Pendergast and the iron hand with which he ruled Kansas City until his fall. Serrano’s personal journey into that time takes the story further into those crucial years when the city tried to shake off the yoke of machine politics and political corruption and step into a new era of reform. In his quest to uncover the details of his grandfather’s life, Serrano re-creates the flavor of mid-twentieth-century Kansas City. He shows us real-life characters who broaden our understanding of the city’s history: sheriffs and deputies, political bosses and coroners. And he also discovers a city filled with lost souls like James Lyons: the denizens of Kansas City’s skid row, a neglected area near the river bottom that once housed the city’s gilded community but now was home to derelicts and drunks. As Serrano gradually comes to terms with the darker side of his family history, he traces a parallel reconciliation of the city with its own sordid past. James Lyons died just as the old ways of the city were dying, and this spellbinding account shows how one town in one time struggled with its past to find a brighter future.

This project is based on the reminiscences of Elizabeth Hawley Bowen Everett (1857-1940). She originally compiled these stories, records, and reflections about her life and her family in response to curiosity expressed by her grand-daughter, Betty Bowen Hanes. Her collection is called, The Olden Time or Stories for Betty. As we immersed ourselves in this family’s history, we became convinced that the experiences of its various members represented those of countless Americans. Their participation in this country’s struggle for independence, the western migration, the establishment of towns on the prairie, in school teaching from Maine to Mississippi and Nebraska, make this story significant beyond its interest to the family’s descendents. In consequence, we made the decision to annotate the collection in an effort to aid the modern reader with obscure references and to provide some historical background. We have presented Elizabeth Hawley’s own work with only the slightest editing and occasional rearrangement, and we have clearly identified our additions as footnotes, by brackets or a change in typeface. Several observations should be mentioned here. The influence of New England culture on the prairie society is marked. The interest in education is attested by both the number of schools established in these small towns and the number of students who enrolled. Women and girls attended school as well as boys and young men. Women taught, even in male preparatory schools, and ran their own schools. Religion, in the form of protestant denominations, was a strong influence and along with it temperance societies. Little distinction was made among the various protestant traditions as long as the preaching was “faithful” and “effective,” for the church of one’s family might well be unrepresented in a new town. Customs of dress and manners were transported from New England along with the settlers. Land divisions took similar forms as did the governing bodies of townships. As a family history, this is an odyssey of school teachers. Their devotion to education is represented first in Maine, by The Reverend Reuben Nason’s Gorham Academy, now located on the campus of the University of Southern Maine, and finally, at the end of the western journey, by the presence of the family home facing the campus of the University of Nebraska. There were teachers in each generation, both men and women, in preparatory schools and seminaries from Maine and New York to Mississippi, Iowa, and Nebraska and, beginning with Reuben Nason’s graduation from Harvard in 1802, students at Bowdoin and Dartmouth Colleges, at the University of Illinois and finally the University of Nebraska, where the young Hawleys studied. We offer this collection of memories, stories, and anecdotes to all who are interested in this period of American history and to the descendents of these hardy folk.

When author Gail Okawa was in high school in Honolulu, a neighbor mentioned that her maternal grandfather had been imprisoned in a World War II concentration camp on the US mainland. Questioning her parents, she learned only that “he came back a changed man.” Years later, as an adult salvaging that grandfather’s memorabilia, she found a mysterious photo of a group of Japanese men standing in front of an adobe building, compelling her eventually to embark on a project to learn what happened to him. Remembering Our Grandfathers’ Exile is a composite chronicling of the Hawai‘i Japanese immigrant experience in mainland exile and internment during World War II, from pre-war climate to arrest to exile to return. Told through the eyes of a granddaughter and researcher born during the war, it is also a research narrative that reveals parallels between pre-WWII conditions and current twenty-first century anti-immigrant attitudes and heightened racism. The book introduces Okawa’s grandfather, Reverend Tamasaku Watanabe, a Protestant minister, and other Issei prisoners—all legal immigrants excluded by law from citizenship—in a collective biographical narrative that depicts their suffering, challenges, and survival as highly literate men faced with captivity in the little-known prison camps run by the U.S. Justice and War Departments. Okawa interweaves documents, personal and official, and internees’ firsthand accounts, letters, and poetry to create a narrative that not only conveys their experience but, equally important, exemplifies their literacy as ironic and deliberate acts of resistance to oppressive conditions. Her research revealed that the Hawai‘i Issei/immigrants who had sons in military service were eventually distinguished from the main group; the narrative relates visits of some of those sons to their imprisoned fathers in New Mexico and elsewhere, as well as the deaths of sons killed in action in Europe and the Pacific. Documents demonstrate the high degree of literacy and advocacy among the internees, as well as the inherent injustice of the government’s policies. Okawa’s project later expanded to include New Mexico residents having memories of the Santa Fe Internment Camp—witnesses who provide rare views of the wartime reality.

Based on the authoritative Italian edition of Gramsci's work, 'Quaderni del Carcere', this translation presents the intellectual as he ought to be read and understood.

The book contains stories of the author's youth in a small Kentucky town in the 1940's and 1950's. He relates an array of experiences both funny and serious. In addition, he presents the agonizing details of torture in German and Japanese prison campe in WW ll for two soldiers from his home town, then a tribute to two local artists with extrodinary talents and finally perserves the lineage and heitage of a prominent family whose contributions to the community are unequaled.

The memoirs of James Larkin Pearson (1879-1981), the second Poet Laureate of North Carolina. Born in a crude cabin atop Wilkes County's Berry Mountain, James Larkin Pearson was determined to become a poet. He had little formal education, and spent his early years in farming and carpentry. Pearson said he "Worked on the farm till I was 21 years old. Many of my poems were composed as I went about my work on the farm. I always carried my notebook and pencil to the field with me, and as I trudged between the plow-handles in the hot sunshine, my mind was busy working out a poem."In addition to his poetry, Mr. Pearson published The Fool-Killer a successful newspaper that acquired a circulation of some 5,000 readers.On August 4, 1953, Governor William B. Umstead appointed Pearson as the North Carolina Poet Laureate of the State. He held this post until his death, on August 27, 1981.

Drawing on twenty-five years of teaching prison college and volunteer classes in eleven Michigan and California prisons, The Prisoners' World strives to make the 'prisoners' voice' come alive for regular college students. The book starts off by tracing shifts in social definitions of criminality, and lays out the premises of the U.S. incarceration binge in the 1986 War on Drugs laws and subsequent mandatory sentencing and policing. Later chapters discuss issues such as leaving home, cell life, correctional officers and treatment, the homosexual prisoner, and drugs. Furthermore, the book discusses the teachers' experiences via author narrative essays that draw the reader into prisoner student and prisoner teacher interaction, and what it is like inside prison college classes where both young and older black prisoner students describe growing up in the inner cities. The book also draws upon over sixty prisoner essays that provide insight on prisoner life and self-concept with insights on pathways to prison, drug selling, the inner city and guns. There is also a strong focus on the 'inside' experiences of entering prison and orientation, daily work routine, correctional officers and surreptitious activities like cell cooking and contraband. These essays are capped by prisoner critiques of prison life from those still in the system. The Prisoners' World serves as a successful supplemental book whose material has proven useful in undergraduate criminal justice classes. As college students themselves, on-campus students in these classes will identify with the prisoner-student voices who share their experiences but in a radically different environment.

My Grandfather’s Mill – Journey to Freedom is a true story — part history, part biography. It focuses on two families and their two infant children, Andrew and Chrystyna, born in Western Ukraine at the height of the Second World War. Their parents fought for Ukrainian independence throughout the years of Polish occupation, the invasion of Stalin’s Bolshevik forces and during the years of Hitler’s Nazi terror. Members of both their families were murdered by one or another of the occupying armies. Family accounts of concentration camps, refugee camps; of war crimes, brutality and uncertainty, of hope, courage and unexpected generosity are interwoven with the historical realities of the time. They were among the lucky ones who found freedom in North America. Half a century after they left their homeland, Andrew and Chrystyna returned. They discovered the villages of their birth, found family members they didn’t know existed, experienced their culture fi rst-hand and fi nally began to make sense of their place in history. This book is written for future generations, for all those who have lived in two very different worlds, for victims of wars, present day refugees, immigrants and especially for those who were born and have always lived in a free country and never experienced the horrors of war.