Ron Tarver was one of the earliest photographers to dedicate himself to documenting the lives of Black cowboys, which he has done for thirty years... The Long Ride Home celebrates the heritage and the enduring resilience of these Black cowboys... Elizabeth Cheng Krist, Senior Photo Editor, National Geographic Magazine

The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America is among the first books to tell the story of the Black cowboy experience in contemporary America. Although Black cowboys have been a fixture on the American landscape since the nineteenth century, few people are aware of their enduring contributions to the history of the West and how their unique culture continues to thrive in urban as well as rural areas all over the country.

The book features Ron Tarver's beautiful, compelling, and often surprising contemporary images of African-American cowboys that not only convey the Black cowboy's way of life and its rich heritage, but also affirm a thriving culture of Black-owned ranches and rodeo operations, parades, inner-city cowboys, retired cowhands, and Black cowgirls of all ages, too. Tarver, who comes from a family of Black cowboys in Oklahoma, uses his artistry to question, if not upend, long-held notions of what it means to be a cowboy and, with that, what it means to be an American.

The Long Ride Home couldn't be more timely, coming on the heels of Beyonce's hit album, Cowboy Carter (2024), and films such as Lil Nas X's hit time-travel Western, Old Town Road (2019), and Idris Elba's Concrete Cowboy (2021). The latter was based on Greg Neri's book, Ghetto Cowboy (2013), about Philadelphia's contemporary African-American cowboy culture. Many of Tarver's images were made in some of the same Philadelphia neighborhoods.

In addition to Tarver's photographs, The Long Ride Home includes an essay by Art T. Burton, an expert on the history of Black cowboys. This book is both a tribute to and a celebration of the Black cowboy in America, providing an invaluable and unique perspective on American history and culture as well as the Black experience in America.

An unforgettable account of how misguided and illegal U.S. policies in Central America during the 1980s resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, created many of today's problems along America's Southern Border, and helped perpetuate a legacy of hawkish militarism at the expense of democracy and diplomacy.

During the 1980s, the United States financed and directed wars against popular movements in Central America. Vowing to block Soviet expansion, the U.S. waged a Vietnam-style counterinsurgency in El Salvador while orchestrating a covert and illegal war to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Some 75,000 died in El Salvador, and more than 30,000 were killed in Nicaragua, most of them civilians. Countless more were displaced. Meanwhile, with tacit U.S. support, the Guatemalan military razed hundreds of Indigenous communities and killed more than 200,000 people during a civil war that claimed the lives of 100,000 Mayan villagers.

Scott Wallace arrived in Central America in 1983 to cover these conflicts as a freelance stringer for CBS News and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as well as Newsweek, The Independent, and The Guardian. Traveling along the frontlines of war, Wallace evolved a distinctive reporting style that included photojournalistic portraits of startling intimacy, page-turning tales of high adventure, and incisive analysis of the events he witnessed. The result is this unforgettable account of a reporter coming of age on the battlefield as he seeks the truth amid a landscape rife with death and deception.

Introduced by the Honorable Christopher J. Dodd, readers will find within these pages a compelling and eye-opening narrative and visual record of the conflicts that continue to reverberate in the crisis on America's southern border with Mexico and in policy decisions made in Washington that impact families at home and throughout the world. Situating the exercise of U.S. power on a continuum running from Vietnam through Central America to Iraq, where he later reported, Wallace provides a rare look into the real-life consequences of morally dubious policies while offering a gripping primer for aspiring foreign correspondents and field reporters.

In Central America in the Crosshairs of War, Scott Wallace presents a compelling memoir that not only reboots America's history of misadventures overseas since Vietnam, but also restores faith in the importance and power of journalism at a time when disinformation and alternate realities abound in America and abroad. As Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Debrorah Nelson observers: Scott Wallace takes us along his harrowing journey into the Central American jungles for an important historical accounting that draws a sharp line from the U.S. proxy wars of the 1980s to today's crises in those countries and at our own southern border.

In a world full of exiles, more than 150,000 of which are Tibetan, this book is not only of historical significance, it puts a human face on the increasingly complex problem of people being forcibly displaced from their homelands...

Tibetan Memories is the first book to present the stories and compelling images of ordinary Tibetan women and men in exile. In their own words, we listen to the gravity of their situations, and each story is accompanied by uplifting black-and-white portraits of those featured and of Ladakh, where they found refuge after the Chinese communists took over their homeland in 1959.

In a world full of exiles and refugees, 150,000 of whom are Tibetan, this book is not only of historical significance, it is timely. It puts an unforgettable human face on the increasingly complex and growing problem of people being forcibly displaced from their homeland--as many as 110 million according to a recent U.N. study.

To meet the people and make these photographs, Dr. Johnson and his wife, Mirasol, traveled throughout Ladakh, visiting many villages and talking with dozens of people. Most of them had to leave everything behind when they fled: their family, friends, and animals, often their most precious possessions and with whom they had a unique and symbiotic relationship.
The situation of the Tibetan refugees in Ladakh and the rest of India, which has the highest concentration of Tibetan refugees, is particularly heartbreaking and challenging. They cannot become citizens, own land or property, or travel internationally or freely even throughout India. They also are excluded from government or other public jobs.

Yet, as Dr. Johnson reveals in his photographs and stories, all of these refugees are remarkably resilient, wise, and hopeful. They have made their tragedy--and their enduring devotion to their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and to their Buddhist practice--sources of strength which continue to sustain them. With an enduring faith, they maintain their belief that Tibet will one day be free, believing that losing that hope would be the ultimate disaster.

In these often difficult and dark times throughout the world, when too many people are uncertain of their future and concerned about the future well-being of the planet, these remarkable individuals from Tibet show us the meaning of hope and of never giving up. They also show us that every human being deserves compassion, for, without it, the future of humanity stands in peril.

In October 1921 the famous planner and conservationist Benton MacKaye formally proposed the establishment of the Appalachian Trail (the AT) from northern Georgia to Maine. The trail and its 2,198.4 miles was finally opened in 1937. Today, it is one of the most visited and cherished greenways and hiking paths in North America.

In Hiking the AT in the Virginias, Dave Pruett shares his incredible journey of hiking all 559 miles of the AT in Virginia and West Virginia, beginning with retirement at sixty-five and completing it as a septuagenarian at age 75. Perhaps no stretch of the AT provides such awe, diversity, and wonder as the AT in Virginia and West Virginia, which, prior to 1862, were one state. Pruett's informative and beautifully illustrated book conveys what it is like to experience the AT's many characteristics--its vistas, bridges, flora, meadows, shelters, weather, water sources, wildlife, and magic--in an unforgettable journey.

For those who seek a sense of what it is like to walk and hike the AT in the Virginias, Pruett's book is perhaps the best guide available. Written for the general reader and for the millions who visit not only the AT but the Skyline Drive, Blue Ridge Parkway, and Shenandoah and Great Smokey Mountains National Parks, Pruett's book is an indispensable and memorable guide.

2015 IPPY Silver Medalist, Best Mid-Atlantic Nonfiction

Twice the size of Central Park, Rock Creek Park is the wild, wooded heart of Washington, DC, offering refuge from a frantic city pace to millions of visitors each year. Rock Creek Valley, which serves as the spine of the national park, has a long and storied history--from Amerindians who fished the creek, hunted the woods, and quarried the rock outcroppings, to Euro-Americans' claims on the land as mill sites, to widespread deforestation during the American Civil War, to its ecological restoration and designation as a federal park in 1890. Melanie Choukas-Bradley, renowned naturalist and writer, spent a year in Rock Creek Park walking and skiing its trails at all times of day, observing and recording natural events in all seasons and weather conditions. Enhanced by the evocative photographs of Susan Austin Roth, A Year in Rock Creek Park takes readers on an incredible and unforgettable journey.

Distributed for George F. Thompson Publishing (www.gftbooks.com)

A treasure trove of beautiful and informative illustrations of key areas of the Holy Land during the late nineteenth century.

This book is a beautiful and engaging presentation of drawings and letters by John Douglas Woodward (1846-1924), a prominent American artist/illustrator during the 1870s and 1880s. He was on assignment for New York publisher D. Appleton and Co. to make on-the-spot drawings for illustrations for Picturesque Palestine, Sinai and Egypt (1881-1883), which has been called the most important book of illustrations of the region of its time. Some 200 of his compositions appeared in the book as wood engravings, the least expensive mass media of the time, while he contributed the art for 13 steel engravings. Woodward traveled with the somewhat older and better-known artist, Harry Fenn, who was the lead artist for the very successful Picturesque America, published by D. Appleton in parts from 1872-1874. Woodward was the second most prolific contributor to Picturesque America and, like Fenn, also traveled and drew for Picturesque Europe (1878-1879).

Woodward's travels for Picturesque Palestine yielded a treasure trove of unique historical art and correspondence. Most drawings for book and magazine illustrations during this period were discarded by the artist after the printing plates were made. But Woodward saved his, providing a visual record, often in full color, of the region, in addition to the black-and-white illustrations in the book. In presenting them alongside his lively, engaging letters, this book will appeal to those interested in the history and art of the Middle East as well as in the appearance of places of importance mentioned in the Holy Bible and the specifics of travel to the region during the 1870s, when there was almost no tourist infrastructure and limited knowledge of other cultures.

Although Picturesque Palestine is well-known to scholars and connoisseurs and available in some libraries and on-line, Woodward's drawings and letters recording his trip to Palestine are not. The exquisite drawings, rendered in pencil, watercolor, and gouache, belong to the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia and have been stored since 1941 at Shrine Mont, a conference center in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley (founded by the artist's nephew). The letters to his wife and mother are in the collection of the Valentine History Museum in Richmond.

Recounts Aldo Leopold's family restoring a farm, blending conservation, memories, and legacy.

In Aldo Leopold's Shack: Nina's Story, Nancy Nye Hunt tells the remarkable tale of the famous Leopold family's efforts to restore a worn-out farm along the lower Wisconsin River near Baraboo in the 1930s during the Great Depression and into the 1940s. Aldo Leopold, the world-renowned ecologist and conservationist--along with Estella, his wife, and their five children and two dogs, Gus and Flick--spent most weekends and vacations living and working at their Sand County farm that they called the Shack, now a National Historic Landmark that is also listed on both the National and Wisconsin Registers of Historic Places.

Told through the eyes of Nina, the eldest daughter, details of life at the Shack unfold seasonally. Along the way, readers learn about the family's many experiences and adventures: healing the land and converting an old chicken coop into a cabin (the Shack); restoring prairies and improving woodlands; planting gardens, collecting firewood, and tending orchards; observing animal tracks, bird migrations, and times when plants bloom; cooking meals over an open fire; singing the family's old Spanish songs from New Mexico, where Estella was born and raised and had deep Spanish roots, and having great fun walking, swimming, canoeing, cross-country skiing, and playing tracking games.

While at the Shack, Aldo and his family also recorded scientific observations in their Shack journals. These journals became the basis of Aldo's 1949 landmark book, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. That book continues to inspire people today with its call for a land ethic in everyday life. Visiting the Shack, as thousands of people from all over the world do every year, is the equivalent of seeking out Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond as a pilgrimage site and source of inspiration.

Using interviews with Nina and the Leopold family and relying on the original Shack journals, historic family photographs, and her extensive field experiences over dozens of years, Hunt has captured the spirit of this special place as no other book previously has. Here, readers discover Nina's story of growing up at the Shack and learn about the family's favorite recipes and songs as well as genealogical information all that go back centuries. And the blending of Nina's story with 161 historic and contemporary photographs of life at the Shack, maps, and original pencil drawings of wildlife all provide for a transformative reading experience.

First published in 2011 and now presented in an updated and greatly expanded new edition, including 38 new illustrations, 32 additional pages, and a new field trip to the Shack, readers will be able to appreciate and better understand Aldo's famous concepts--the land ethic and phenology--that continue to influence our lives today. This book is a unique tribute and introduction to one of the world's greatest conservationists and his family and how one place--the Shack--can help shape the world.

The first book to feature Dwayne Wilcox's incredible ledger drawings of Native life.

FOREWORD REVIEW'S 2021 INDIES HONORABLE MENTION for Best Book in Popular Culture

Plains Indian ledger art grew out of the Native tradition of recording and chronicling through art important exploits by warriors and chiefs, among them images of war and hunting, that would adorn tipis and animal hides. These were seen as historical markers. But Native life on the Great Plains underwent tremendous change following the American Civil War, when the American conquest of the West was in full gear. In just a few decades, access to the hides of diminishing herds of bison, deer, antelope, and elk became more difficult and eventually impossible with reservation life. Native people creatively turned to the easily available ledger books of settlers, traders, and military men as their new canvases.

The ledger art drawings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are revered today for their depiction of Native life during the difficult transition to life on the reservation. The ledger drawings thus became a singularly important way for Native artists to preserve tribal history and to serve as a new kind of personal socio-political expression.

Dwayne Wilcox, who grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation and is a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation, became interested in ledger art at an early age. He was influenced by the work of Lakota ledger artists such as Amos Bad Heart Bull (1869-1913), but he always sought to defy stereotypical notions of Native life and history and create his own artistic vision. Dwayne eventually focused on humor as his way to comment on the objectification of Native Americans. Skilled as an artist beyond measure, Dwayne's ledger art drawings win major prizes and are sought by museums and collectors who see in him a true artist.

Visual/Language is Dwayne's first book, and it was created as a collaborative effort with curator Karen Miller Nearburg, who provides an enlightening introduction to his work. This book will surely penetrate the heart and soul and mind of all who read it.

For more than fifty years, Yi-Fu Tuan has carried the study of humanistic geography--what John K. Wright early in the twentieth century called geosophy, a blending of geography and philosophy--to new heights, offering with each new book a fresh and often unique intellectual introspection into the human condition. His latest book, Humanist Geography, is a testament of all that he has learned and encountered as a geographer.
In returning to and reappraising his previous books, Tuan emphasizes how the study of humanist geography can offer a younger generation of students, scholars, and teachers a path toward self-discovery, personal fulfillment, and even enlightenment. He argues that in the study of place can be found the wonders of the human mind and imagination, especially as understood by the senses, even as we human beings deal with nature's stringencies and our own deep flaws.

Fish Town is an inspired documentary project focused on preserving, through photography and oral history recordings, the cultural and environmental remains of southeastern Louisiana's fishing communities. Owing to a dying wild-caught seafood industry and a rapidly vanishing coastline, the places and people who are multigenerations deep in Louisiana's fishing traditions have been quietly slipping into extinction for decades, many without a form of historic preservation. These are the same towns that not only have made New Orleans an epicenter of fresh seafood dining but have traditionally served as getaway places for New Orleanian families, an escape to nature where time can be spent together sport fishing on the lakes and bayous and gathering around crab and crawfish boils. J. T. Blatty has been traveling down the road from her home in New Orleans since 2009, capturing these places and people as no one previously has.

Fish Town includes 137 color photographs taken by Blatty between 2012 and 2017. Interspersed throughout are text narratives transcribed from audio recordings with long-standing members of the fishing communities, many of whose ancestors came to Louisiana during the late 1600s.

J. T. Blatty is a freelance photographer, writer, and artist based in New Orleans. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally and have appeared in CNN Photos, Charleston Magazine, National Geographic Traveler, The Daily Beast, the Oxford American, Savannah Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, and USA Today, among other publications.

Craig E. Colten is the Carl O. Sauer Professor of Geography at Louisiana State University and the author, most recently, of Southern Waters: The Limits to Abundance.

Distributed for George F. Thompson Publishing

Gold Winner of the 2023 IPPY Awards for Best Regional Book of Non-Fiction for New England

Occupying Massachusetts: Layers of History on Indigenous Land is an art book that engages with history. Featuring photographs of dwellings and vernacular structures found in rural Massachusetts, the book is a meditation on the human occupation of land, with an emphasis on the long presence of Indigenous people and the waves of settlement by people from other countries that began during the early 1600s and continues today.

Utilizing a muted color palette, Matthews's photographs of both structures and historical markers are subtle and haunting. They suggest the presence of histories, embedded in the landscape but often invisible. Although the book is focused on Massachusetts, it implicitly raises larger issues of settlement and nationhood. How did the United States of America come to occupy its land? How is this story told? As a longtime occupant/occupier of Massachusetts herself, Matthews aims to understand more deeply the land on which she lives.

The main text of the book comes from photographs of historic markers, which were installed around the state at different times by different interest groups. The words on these markers describe early relations between Indigenous people and largely English settlers, from diverse points of view. In this way, the book explores how difficult histories are written and how they change over time. Concluding essays by Indigenous activist David Brule and poet Suzanne Gardinier provide important perspectives as well, connecting the past and future. Occupying Massachusetts is a moving story whose message will be appreciated for years to come.

This beautiful photography book chronicles the work of Ammon Weinstein, master violin maker and creator of an educational program about the Holocaust so moving and magnificent he received an Anne Frank Special Recognition Award for his efforts.

Gold Winner of the 2022 IPPY Awards in History
FOREWORD REVIEW'S 2021 INDIES FINALIST for Best Book in Photography

Amnon Weinstein, an Israeli master luthier (violin maker), began a project years ago that may be one of the most creative, effective, and magnificent approaches to education on the topic of the Holocaust. Trained by three of the most revered Cremona, Italian luthiers of the twentieth century, Weinstein's vision was to restore violins that survived the concentration camps and the ghettos, even when their owners often did not. To date, more than seventy violins have been restored to their highest playable condition. Following restoration, these hauntingly beautiful instruments have been used in performances by symphonies in Berlin, Cleveland, Istanbul, London, Quebec, Paris, San Francisco, and many other cities across the world. Purposefully, Weinstein makes certain that young musicians as well as members of some of the world's most famed orchestras perform on them to packed concert halls. In doing so, it's as if the past owners of the instruments return to fill the listener-observer's mind and body. For his efforts, Amnon and his Violins of Hope project received the 2020 Anne Frank Special Recognition Award, created by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to honor those who have demonstrated a commitment to fighting intolerance, antisemitism, racism, or discrimination.

In Violins and Hope, Daniel Levin has made the most compelling and beautiful series of photographs documenting Weinstein's collection of violins, his workshop in Tel Aviv, and his processes for restoration. This book is not a document of place, as much as it is a document of the ethereal. For what Weinstein has done with these lost violins has been to transform tragic loss into triumph in the most insightful and powerful way imaginable. The care that Levin has taken to hone in on the idiosyncrasies of Amnon's workshop, and his uncanny ability to celebrate the beauty of light, is nothing short of remarkable.

The book's foreword is written by arguably the most well-suited individual anywhere. Born in Austria, Franz Welser-Möst is one of the most acclaimed conductors of the twenty-first century. He has been Music Director of the Cleveland Orchestra since 2002, and, under his direction, The Cleveland, as it has been fondly named by The New York Times, has had twenty international tours, with shimmering reviews. All too aware of his ancestry, Welser-Möst takes on our mutual history as no one else could. And the book concludes with Levin's interview with Assi Weinstein, Amnon's wife, who talks about the Violins of Hope project and its enduring legacy.

Views from the Reservation is filled with spiritual power and insightful observations. [...] The pictures are beautiful; the circumstances are not. This book is a wake-up call, for those who are unaware of or have not considered the historic and current issues of Indigenous Americans and the Oglala Lakota Tribe in particular. -- Zeke Magazine

Photographer John Willis has long been aware of the exploitation that can occur when photographers enter communities as outsiders. So, in 1992, when he first visited the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, he assured elders of the Oglala Lakota nation that he would not exhibit any of his images. Over time, however, Willis earned the respect and trust of the community, and the elders urged him to show his work and create this book so that others might better understand Lakota land and life.

Willis has returned to the reservation every year since 1992, and he has come to grasp and interpret this place as few others have. Views from the Reservation, first published to widespread acclaim in 2010 and now presented in an updated and expanded edition, remains a gift--a wopila--that is meant to open the minds, eyes, and hearts of outsiders to the life, culture, and conditions of the Oglala Lakota people.

Along with his insightful and accomplished images, Willis has enlisted other voices to offer a more complete story: Lakota elders and high school students from the Pine Ridge Reservation offer powerful poems; writer Kent Nerburn contributes an original essay; Emil Her Many Horses, a curator at the National Museum of the American Indian, tells his story of growing up on the rez; Kevin Gover, Director of the National Museum of the American Indian, apologizes for the government's abuse of native people; Oglala Lakota artist Dwayne Wilcox shares his provocative ledger drawings; and members of the Reddest family present their amazing photo collection.

Views from the Reservation is a masterful book that has been praised by the Lakota people for its honesty, spirit, and depth. It offers the chance for native peoples and outsiders alike to appreciate and respect the Pine Ridge Reservation from contemporary and historical points of view, with art and storytelling leading the way.

After the American Revolution, sites representing key events in American history were crucial to the young nation's efforts to formalize its story. Following the Civil War, national history became a primary vehicle for patriotic and spiritual reconstruction, and sites such as historic battlefields served important roles in remembering the past during the nation's subsequent challenging periods, including the Great Depression and the Vietnam War.

Gettysburg Contested traces patterns of commemoration back to the well-known field of battle of July 1-3, 1863, which earned a legacy as sacred ground that remains today, more than 150 years later. But the landscape history and record of preservation at Gettysburg are complicated, for Gettysburg has wrestled with large issues, ranging from public versus private development, to the role of local, state, and federal governments, to the actual implementation of memorialization on the battlefield.

Although the story of the battle is ingrained in the fabric of American memory, Brian Black's account considerably broadens the scope. Never before has Gettysburg's story been told so completely, offering layer upon layer, story upon story. Gettysburg thus becomes a springboard to understanding more fully the nation's need for sacred sites and symbols of America's past, including cherished landscapes such as Gettysburg. In Gettysburg Contested, America's treasured battlefield becomes the great laboratory for how Americans preserve and honor the past.

Distributed for George Thompson Publishing

The first photo-text book ever published on the history of Shenandoah Valley apples.

Through oral histories and color photographs from apple orchards and workplaces in the Shenandoah Valley and Blue Ridge regions of Virginia, Shenandoah Valley Apples explores the history, current conditions, and possible future of apple growing in the Shenandoah Valley and Blue Ridge regions of Virginia. The book explores questions such as: What was apple growing like in early Virginia agriculture? How has the apple industry changed over time? What are the greatest challenges currently faced by growers? What are the most satisfying aspects of work in the apple industry? What are the greatest hopes of apple growers for the future?

Shenandoah Valley Apples relays a historical and cultural legend exemplified by relationships between people and land in the context of an economy that has always been regional, national, and international in nature. It also describes a unique present in which economic pressures, international trade, and encroaching development are changing those people and that land with unprecedented severity and speed. At the same time, proud stories of adaptation, perseverance and success are also part of the picture. Shenandoah Valley Apples preserves the legacy of one of Virginia's most important and rapidly disappearing cultural landscapes. It also raises awareness of and concern for broader issues that affect agriculture and land use everywhere.

The photographs and oral histories included in Shenandoah Valley Apples were made in Albermarle, Augusta, Botetourt, Clarke, Frederick, Madison, Nelson, Rockingham, Shenandoah and Warren counties in Virginia. The perspectives featured include those of first through fifth generation apple growers. The orchards that were photographed range from a nine-acre roadside operation to mid-sized orchards on diversified family farms to some of the nation's largest commercial orchards.

Three centuries ago, the Los Angeles River meandered through marshes and forests of willow and sycamore. Trout spawned in its waters, and grizzly bears roamed its shores in search of food. The river and its adjacent woodlands helped support one of the largest concentrations of indigenous peoples in North America, and it also largely determined the location of the first Spanish Pueblo and ultimately the city of Los Angeles. The river was also the city's sole source of water for more than a century before flood-control projects made the L.A. River what it is today.

Michael Kolster, in L.A. River, relies on a nineteenth-century photographic technology to render the Los Angeles River today, from its headwaters in Canoga Park and the suburbs of the San Fernando Valley to its mouth at the Pacific Ocean in Long Beach. Coincidentally, the founding of the city of Los Angeles and California's achievement of statehood in 1850 coincide historically with the invention of the wet-plate photographic process, forever linking the city and state with the centrality of photography. The moving images that define L.A. River show a feature of the city's landscape that initially attracted native peoples to its banks and gave rise to the formation of our nation's second-largest city.

Channeled in concrete during the last century to control flooding, the river was all but removed from the life of the city until the turn of the twenty-first century, when concerted efforts were made by some to peel back some of the concrete and to let nature live once again. In his photographic journey, Kolster considers both the past and present and how the accumulation of life along the river suggests a larger a role for the L.A. River in the lives of the city's inhabitants.

Award-winning photographer Stephen Marc offers a vibrant new look at America and her people, presenting the before and after impact of the pandemic.

In his award-winning book, American / True Colors, Stephen Marc presents one of the most comprehensive photographic surveys ever conducted about America and Americans. For his efforts--the survey includes both the Obama and Trump presidencies--for his artistry, and for his unique African-American perspective, the Independent Publishers Book Awards gave American / True Colors its 2021 Gold Medal for the Best Book of the Year in Photography.

But Stephen Marc was not finished with telling the American story. In Street Cat Tales and Tangled Times, the artist takes us on another sweeping journey, coast to coast, this time straddling before and during the COVID years when America and Americans were confronted by a multitude of unprecedented challenges that affected citizens in every aspect of life no matter where they might live.

Introduced by Dr. Carla D. Hayden, 14th Librarian of Congress and the first woman and first African American to hold that distinguished post since its founding in 1802, and featuring 210 new photographs by Stephen Marc, including 85 captivating digital montages, Street Cat Tales and Tangled Times offers a creative and highly insightful look at how Americans have been living their life on the streets during this time of COVID and controversial Supreme Court rulings and the severe impacts of climate change, social injustice, mass shootings and gun violence, inflation, intense political division, the Big Lie, the January 6 insurrection, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and so much more.

As was the case with American / True Colors, in Street Cat Tales and Tangled Times we see how the American journey continues. How in our ongoing search for a more perfect Union we need to recognize and respect more fully the personal histories that brought us here and the truths we need to face. How in the process of moving forward toward an uncertain future we embrace the joy of living and learn to grow and heal as families, communities, and a nation.

A rare photographic river trip revealing the once-celebrated but now-hidden industrial landscapes of Pennsylvania that helped shape the nation.

The Schuylkill River flows more than 130 miles from the mountains of the Pennsylvania Coal Region to its confluence with the Delaware River. It passes through five counties--Schuylkill, Berks, Chester, Montgomery, and Philadelphia--and its valley is home to more than three million people. Yet few are aware of the hidden ruins and traces left by a pioneering 200-year-old inland waterway that opened in 1825: the Schuylkill Navigation. Some of it is literally buried in their own backyards.

Often called the Schuylkill Canal, this complex Navigation system actually boasted twenty-seven canals. The first of the anthracite-carrying routes in America, the 108-mile Navigation shadowed the Schuylkill River for nearly all its length. It once had more than thirty dams and slackwater pools, more than 100 stone locks, numerous aqueducts, and the first transportation tunnel in the nation. They were all built by hand starting in 1816.

During the 1940s, as part of a massive environmental cleanup of the river, this important and influential infrastructure was largely dismantled--but not entirely. Two short sections of the watered canal get plenty of attention: the Oakes Reach at Schuylkill Canal Park near Phoenixville and the Manayunk Canal in Philadelphia. Both are popular recreational destinations. What happened to the rest of it?

Photographer Sandy Sorlien resolved to find out. Over the course of seven years, she repeatedly traveled upriver from her home near the Manayunk Canal, bushwhacking along the riverbanks and rowing and paddling in the river itself. Armed with camera and binoculars, loppers and trekking poles, nineteenth-century maps and modern satellite imagery, and later abetted by local historians and an archaeologist, she found all sixty-one lock sites and explored most of the canal beds. Her photographs reveal a mysterious remnant landscape, evidence of an extraordinary engineering feat that spelled its own demise. The water pollution created by the coal industry, unregulated factory and residential waste, and obstructive dams all but destroyed the river that fed the Navigation. Clogged channels, railway competition, and repeated flood damage meant the end of a way of life for the towns that boomed along the canals, and only a few historians keep its memory alive.

Along with Sorlien's color plates and explanatory essays, Inland features a selection of historic images, rare historic Schuylkill Navigation Company maps, and early Philadelphia Watering Committee plans. The book also includes a foreword by renowned landscape scholar John R. Stilgoe, an essay on regional transportation history by Mike Szilagyi, Trails Project Manager for the Schuylkill River Greenways Natural Heritage Area, and an afterword by Karen Young, Director of the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center. A sweeping new Schuylkill River map by Morgan Pfaelzer connects it all.

Inland is the first book to present contemporary photographs from a survey of the entire Schuylkill Navigation, becoming an essential resource for future historians and a resonant visual history all its own.

A truly unique meditation on being among Earth's wildest and most remote places--Alaska's volcanoes!

The volcanoes on the Alaska Peninsula and the fifty-seven volcanoes that project into the Aleutian Islands form the northern rim of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Many are in Alaska's national parks, monuments, and preserves. They continue to erupt, creating new Earth surfaces, and the deposits of lava, pumice, and ash ejected by these volcanoes create primeval ground: a true wilderness where few people on Earth other than volcanologists have traversed.

Gary Freeburg has wandered and lived among Alaska's volcanoes for regular periods during the past three decades. The volcanoes he visits are alive and in some cases still steaming, and its lands are coarse and free of distraction: a vacuum of emptiness that embraces solitude and silence stirred only by the winds that blow and the rains that fall. The Earth surfaces that he walks are hard and largely barren of plant life, except where surfaces are shielded by the wind or are near water sources. There, new life returns in the form of lichen and tiny plants and insects and animals--bees, bear, fox, mayflies, and Alaskan hares--taking their rightful place in these vast, remote national parks, monuments, and preserves, reminding us that they are signs of hope that Earth will continue to evolve, regenerate, and renew itself long after we humans are gone.

Freeburg's writings, photographs, and drawings reflect what it is like to seek solitude and live among Alaska's wild volcanoes. His travels were mostly solo treks in which he was flown in with supplies, a camera, sketchbooks, and journal to share his thoughts and artistically render his experiences. Each day spent in Alaska's volcanic wilderness affirmed the importance of this place for the author and those who can only dream of such a place. His book seems to explain: how fortunate it is to have magical places and national parks like Alaska's volcanoes, how fortunate we are to be alive on this magnificent Earth.

Imagine walking among and learning about 130 ancient cities in 25 countries across the world: from the Mediterranean to the Middle East, from Asia to the Americas. Some are world heritage sites, accessible to tens of thousands of visitors each year, and some are remote and seldom seen. But each ancient city from the distant past conveys a special place in the history of human civilization, and each presents its own story and sense of place.

In Unforgotten: Ancient Cities from a Distant Past, William Frej presents 200 duotone photographs of these ancient cities that are simply unforgettable, capturing as they do their allure, their beauty, their spirit and resonating sense of space. Anne Frej, in her elegant introduction, sets the table for the personal journey that awaits every reader--a journey into deep history and magical architecture and geographical splendor that speaks to us today. And Michael E. Smith, a noted scholar and author, writes about the lessons to be learned from these ancient cities, including his insights into the various urban traditions behind the building of the cities and why their histories remain poignant.

As readers explore the ruins and remnants of these amazing ancient cities, a sense of awe and wonder is ever-present. Yet so is the knowledge that human civilization and life on Earth, no matter how grand, is tenuous and fragile. Even as these places reached their apogee and influence in the distant past, there are reasons why these places were abandoned and replaced. So let your curiosity wander as you turn each page, for you will see in words and pictures why they should not be forgotten.