$9.95
Kindle Edition
by Stephen J. Pyne (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
Early descriptions of the Great Plains often focus on a vast, grassy expanse that was either burnt or burning. The scene continued to burn until the land was plowed under or grazed away and broken by innumerable roads and towns. Yet, where the original landscape has persisted, so has fire, and where people have sought to restore something of that original setting, they have had to reinstate fire. This has required the persistence or creation of a fire culture, which in turn inspired schools of science and art that make the Great Plains today a regional hearth for American fire.
Volume 5 of To the Last Smoke introduces a region that once lay at the geographic heart of American fire, and today promises to reclaim something of that heritage. After all these years, the Great Plains continue to bear witness to how fires can shape contemporary life, and vice versa. In this collection of essays, Stephen J. Pyne explores how this once most regularly and widely burned province of North America, composed of various subregions and peoples, has been shaped by the flames contained within it and what fire, both tame and feral, might mean for the future of its landscapes.
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Hardcover – October 9, 2018
by Herbert Eugene Bolton (Author)
Kindle Edition
by Captivating History (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
It’s likely true that most people picking up this book have never even heard of a place called Peshtigo. This is hardly surprising: this little town on the shores of Lake Michigan is hardly a remarkable place in the modern day. Its residents number less than four thousand, and there’s nothing particularly special about it at first glance. But one does have to look twice at its motto. “A city rebuilt from the ashes.” Peshtigo may be just another small Wisconsin town today, but a hundred and fifty years ago, it really was nothing but ashes. This town was one of the hardest hit in the deadliest wildfire event in American history—and no, I’m not talking about the Great Chicago Fire, even though it also occurred on the very same night. The Great Peshtigo Fire of 1871 claimed four times as many lives as the fire in Chicago, and yet this cruel twist of fate has left it almost unheard-of, while the (untrue) tale of Catherine O’Leary’s cow continues to echo through the centuries with unabated vigor. The story of the Great Peshtigo Fire has not been told nearly often enough, and yet it is a story that will captivate every reader. Parts of it seem to border on science fiction: trees exploding in the heat of the fire, a tornado made of flames sweeping through an entire town in a single hour, birds caught up and burned in mid-air. Yet all of it is true, and so are the stories of the people who witnessed the fire first-hand and survived it.
Paperback – May 21, 2012
by Robert W. Cermak (Author)
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 2005-06-30 Excerpt: ...that were constructed by the CCC in the mid-thirties. The master plan and fire replanning described a Region 5 fire control organization that consisted of lookouts, tank truck suppression crews, a few guards and fire prevention men. The tank truck crew became the backbone of a fire pre-suppression organization that remains essentially unchanged today. The improvements that have occurred since 1940 have largely been in quality of equipment, improved tactics and better communication. Telephone lines were the most important form of communications in the region through World War II, but radio communications made giant strides during the thirties. Radio had a checkered history in the Forest Service. Early experiments in the Apache National Forest (Region 3) in 1916 were followed by wireless transmissions during the Army air patrols of 1919-1921. Because tight budgets were the rule during the twenties, Roy Headley took a dim view of most efforts to improve radio communications. Throughout the early development of radio by the Forest Service, Headley had to be conscious of an agreement with American Telephone Telegraph Company, whereby the Forest Service received lowered telephone rates so long as it did not foster a communication system that competed with the telephone company.38 Headley's opposition changed to strong support after he and Chief Forester Greeley witnessed the demonstration in August 1927 of a crude little contraption built by Dwight L. Beatty of Region 1. Beatty had been a mule skinner, ranger and forest supervisor. While working in the Region 1 office, he educated himself in radio technology and built the contraption to prove that a portable radio could be built. After the demonstration, he was assigned the responsibility for radio developm...
Paperback – June 2, 1997
by Stephen Ambrose (Author)
From the New York Times bestselling author of Band of Brothers and D-Day, the definitive book on Lewis and Clark’s exploration of the Louisiana Purchase, the most momentous expedition in American history and one of the great adventure stories of all time. In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson selected his personal secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, to lead a voyage up the Missouri River to the Rockies, over the mountains, down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean, and back. Lewis and his partner, Captain William Clark, made the first map of the trans-Mississippi West, provided invaluable scientific data on the flora and fauna of the Louisiana Purchase territory, and established the American claim to Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Ambrose has pieced together previously unknown information about weather, terrain, and medical knowledge at the time to provide a vivid backdrop for the expedition. Lewis is supported by a rich variety of colorful characters, first of all Jefferson himself, whose interest in exploring and acquiring the American West went back thirty years. Next comes Clark, a rugged frontiersman whose love for Lewis matched Jefferson’s. There are numerous Indian chiefs, and Sacagawea, the Indian girl who accompanied the expedition, along with the French-Indian hunter Drouillard, the great naturalists of Philadelphia, the French and Spanish fur traders of St. Louis, John Quincy Adams, and many more leading political, scientific, and military figures of the turn of the century. High adventure, high politics, suspense, drama, and diplomacy combine with high romance and personal tragedy to make this outstanding work of scholarship as readable as a novel.
Hardcover – January 1, 2001
by Juan Crespí (Author), Alan K. Brown (Editor)
Text: English, Spanish (translation) Original Language: Spanish
Paperback – September 1, 2019
by Curt Brown (Author)
In 1918, Minnesota and its residents were confronted with a series of devastating events that put communities to the test, forcing them to persevere through untold hardship. First, as the nation immersed itself in the global conflict later known as World War I, some 118,000 Minnesotans served in the war effort, both at home and "over there"–and citizens on the home front were subjected to loyalty tests and new depths of government surveillance. While more than 1,400 Minnesotans were killed on the battlefields, an additional 2,300 soldiers were struck down by another destructive force working its way across the globe in 1918: the influenza pandemic, which left more than 10,000 dead in Minnesota alone. Then, in mid-October, fires raged across 1,500 square miles in seven counties of northeastern Minnesota, leaving thousands homeless and hundreds dead. In Minnesota, 1918, journalist and author Curt Brown explores this monumental year through individual and community stories from all over the state, from residents of small towns up north obliterated by the fire, to government officials in metropolitan centers faced with the spread of a deadly and highly contagious disease, to soldiers returning home to all this from the "war to end all wars."
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