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According to legend, in about 1760, Daniel Boone first named this hinterlands settlement "Wolf Hills." Incorporated in 1778, the town of Abingdon became the leading trade, business, and legal center for Southwest Virginia from the late 1700s to mid-1800s. With a key location along the Great Wagon Road, the community blossomed during the 19th and 20th centuries due to trade, railroad commerce, banking, industry, and its natural resources, such as timber and salt from nearby Saltville. However, from the 1960s to 1980s, downtown lost several historic landmarks to fire and demolition. Businesses began to move to outlying shopping centers, and small, locally owned businesses were replaced by national chain stores. Railroad traffic decreased and no longer moved goods and passengers. Previously the locus for commerce, transportation, and entertainment, the historic downtown area transitioned to an arts and tourist destination and to a unique crossroads service area with government centers, restaurants, speciality stores, offices, banks, and hotels.
“Written with verve, intellectual sophistication, and a prickly wit worthy of its eminent subject. . . . A first-class piece of literate entertainment” (The New Yorker). Before he went on to become a celebrated biographer and historian, renowned for such works as A World Lit Only by Fire, American Caesar, and The Last Lion, William Manchester worked as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun in the 1940s—and it was there that he met fellow journalist H. L. Mencken. This book tells the story of conservative, anarchist H. L. Mencken’s life in compelling, intimate detail—and offers a uniquely personal look at the influential cultural critic and satirist who cofounded the magazines the American Mercury and the Smart Set and became a legend for his sharp and highly quotable wit.
The true measure of a nation's worth in this great family of nations is proportionate to that nation's contribution to the welfare and happiness of the whole. Similarly, an individual is measured by the contributions he or she makes to the well being of the community in which he or she lives. If inventions therefore have played the important part here assigned to them in the gradual development of our complex national life, it becomes important to know what contributions the African American has made to the inventive skill of this country. In this book you will learn that the African American has contributed a disproportionate amount of creativity and resourcefulness on a list of more than 1100 U.S. Patents for inventions ranging from the propeller, the gas mask, air conditioning, pain relieving drugs, heart pace-maker controls and cellular phones to the elevator, rapid-fire guns, nuclear reactors and three-stage rockets. Throughout their long history, African Americans have created a rich, complex and highly diverse culture laced with outstanding role models who have helped make America the strongest country in the world.
"From a leading scholar on the politics of race comes a work of family history, memoir, and insight gained from a unique journey across the continent, on what it is to be Black in North America"--
In late November of 1858 two enslaved Black women—Celia Grayson, age twenty-two, and Eliza Grayson, age twenty—escaped the Stephen F. Nuckolls household in southeastern Nebraska. John Williamson, a man of African American and Cherokee descent from Iowa, guided them through the dark to the Missouri River, where they boarded a skiff and crossed the icy waters, heading for their first stop on the Underground Railroad at Civil Bend, Iowa. In Journey to Freedom Gail Shaffer Blankenau provides the first detailed history of Black enslavement in Nebraska Territory and the escape of these two enslaved Black women from Nebraska City. Poised on the “frontier,” the Graysons’ escape demonstrate...
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