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"Adventure and adventurers United States Biography"
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Zane Grey
Zane Grey was a disappointed aspirant to major league baseball and an unhappy dentist when he belatedly decided to take up writing at the age of thirty. He went on to become the most successful American author of the 1920s, a significant figure in the early development of the film industry, and a central player in the early popularity of the Western._x000B_ _x000B_Thomas H. Pauly's work is the first full-length biography of Grey to appear in over thirty years. Using a hitherto unknown trove of letters and journals, including never-before-seen photographs of his adventures--both natural and amorous--Zane Grey has greatly enlarged and radically altered the current understanding of the superstar author, whose fifty-seven novels and one hundred and thirty movies heavily influenced the world's perception of the Old West._x000B_
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The explorers : a new history of America in ten expeditions
\"A fascinating new history of America, told through the stories of a diverse cast of ten extraordinary-and often overlooked-adventurers, from Sacagawea to Sally Ride, who pushed the boundaries of discovery and determined our national destiny\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Backcountry Ghosts
California is an infamously tough place to be poor: home to about
half of the entire nation's homeless population, burdened by
staggering home prices and unsustainable rental rates, California
is a state in crisis. But it wasn't always that way, as
prize-winning historian Josh Sides reveals in Backcountry
Ghosts . In 1862 President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead
Act, the most ambitious and sweeping social policy in the history
of the United States. In the Golden State more than a hundred
thousand people filed homesteading claims between 1863 and the late
1930s. More than sixty thousand Californians succeeded, claiming
about ten million acres. In Backcountry Ghosts Josh Sides
tells the histories of these Californian homesteaders, their toil
and enormous patience, successes and failures, doggedness in the
face of natural elements and disasters, and resolve to defend
hard-earned land for themselves and their children. While some of
these homesteaders were fulfilling the American Dream-that all
Americans should have the opportunity to own land regardless of
their background or station-others used the Homestead Act to add to
already vast landholdings or control water or mineral rights. Sides
recovers the fascinating stories of individual homesteaders in
California, both those who succeeded and those who did not, and the
ways they shaped the future of California and the American West.
Backcountry Ghosts reveals the dangers of American
dreaming in a state still reeling from the ambitions that led to
the Great Recession.
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The urge to know
\"It was love at first sight when Jonathan Calvert saw the Matterhorn in 1953. Over the next fifty years, Calvert climbed, hiked, trekked, sailed, kayaked, and dog sledded in wild places across the globe. This book is a record of his adventures, told through memoir, journals, and photographs\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Boots, Bikes, and Bombers
Boots, Bikes, and Bombers presents an intimate oral
history of Ginny Hill Wood, a pioneering Alaska conservationist and
outdoorswoman. Born in Washington in 1917, Wood served as a Women's
Airforce Service Pilot in World War II, and flew a military surplus
airplane to Alaska in 1946. Settling in Fairbanks, she went on to
co-found Camp Denali, Alaska's first wilderness ecotourism lodge;
helped start the Alaska Conservation Society, the state's first
environmental organization; and applied her love of the outdoors to
her work as a backcountry guide and an advocate for trail
construction and preservation. An innovative and collaborative life
history, Boots, Bikes, and Bombers , incorporates the story
of friendship between the author and subject. The resulting book is
a valuable contribution to the history of Alaska as well as a
testament to the joys of living a life full of passion and
adventure.
eBook
Icefall : adventures at the wild edges of our dangerous, changing planet
\"In May 2014, the mountaineer and scientist John All fell into a crevasse near Everest and took a series of videos as he struggled to climb out 70 feet of ice and snow with fifteen broken bones - including 6 cracked vertebrae, internal bleeding, a severely dislocated shoulder, and his face covered in blood. The videos of him went viral and appeared in newscasts all over the world: CNN, BBC, Australia, Brazil, Israel, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc. and every website imaginable - from People Magazine to National Geographic. NPR called him \"a badass for science.\" Yet this story is only the latest of All's adventures. He's also won a footrace for his life with a wild hyena, stepped on a black mamba in the African bush, and scaled Everest - all in pursuit of his true passion: the future of adaptation to our world's changing climate. Icefall is more than a fascinating adventure story-it is a report from the extremes, which hold new lessons about the impact of climate change. It is about the collapsing Andean glaciers, the hidden jungles in Honduras where native people have learned about surviving hurricanes, and the highest points on earth, where more scientific secrets lie. The result is a thrilling adventure memoir with profound lessons for how humans will adjust as our world continues to change beneath our feet\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Misadventures of a Civil War Submarine
In 2001, while vacationing on Panama’s Pacific coast, maritime archaeologist James P. Delgado came upon the hulk of a mysterious iron vessel, revealed by the ebbing tides in a small cove at Isla San Telmo. Local inquiries proved inconclusive: the wreck was described as everything from a sunken Japanese suicide submarine from World War II to a poison-laden craft of death that was responsible for the ruin of the pearl beds, decades before.
His professional interest fully aroused, Delgado would go on to learn that the wreck was the remains of one of the first successful deep-diving submersibles, built in 1864 by Julius H. Kroehl, an innovator and entrepreneur who initially sought to develop his invention for military use during the Civil War. The craft’s completion coming too late for that conflict, Kroehl subsequently convinced investors that it could be used to harvest pearls from the Pacific beds off Panama, in waters too deep for native pearl divers to reach.
In Misadventures of a Civil War Submarine, Delgado chronicles the confluence of technological advancement, entrepreneurial aspiration, American capitalist ambition, and ignorance of the physiological effects of deep diving. As he details the layers of knowledge uncovered by his work both in archival sources and in the field excavation of Kroehl’s ill-fated vessel, Delgado weaves the tangled threads of history into a compelling narrative. This finely crafted saga will fascinate and inform professional archaeologists and researchers, naval historians, students and aficionados of maritime exploration, and interested general readers.
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Johnny Appleseed and the American orchard : a cultural history
A fresh look at American icon Johnny \"Appleseed\" Chapman and the story of the apple.
Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard illuminates the meaning of Johnny \"Appleseed\" Chapman's life and the environmental and cultural significance of the plant he propagated. Creating a startling new portrait of the eccentric apple tree planter, William Kerrigan carefully dissects the oral tradition of the Appleseed myth and draws upon material from archives and local historical societies across New England and the Midwest.
The character of Johnny Appleseed stands apart from other frontier heroes like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, who employed violence against Native Americans and nature to remake the West. His apple trees, nonetheless, were a central part of the agro-ecological revolution at the heart of that transformation. Yet men like Chapman, who planted trees from seed rather than grafting, ultimately came under assault from agricultural reformers who promoted commercial fruit stock and were determined to extend national markets into the West. Over the course of his life John Chapman was transformed from a colporteur of a new ecological world to a curious relic of a pre-market one.
Weaving together the stories of the Old World apple in America and the life and myth of John Chapman, Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard casts new light on both.
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