Describes all the fun that will occur at a party that is to take place in Kalamazoo in ten years.

It was 1946, I was 18, a college graduate, and about to become a spy. I was going to 'hit the road'. But what was it like this road when I had hardly been out of Kalamazoo? writes Margean Gladysz in her letters to her parents written from 1946 to 1949. Unearthed from an attic trunk in 2003, these letters detail her employment with The Great Lakes Greyhound Bus Company as a company rat. As a collection, they form the contents of A Spy on the Bus. Eventually, Margean travels all over the country, meets many many people, lives out of a suitcase, makes tons of money and grows in self-reliance and self-confidence. She shows us a life before Interstates, before TV, before everyone had a car. We see 1940s America through the window of a bus, a room at the Y and letters sent home to the farm in Kalamazoo. This is a doozy of a story.

In early 1840, abolitionists founded the Liberty Party as a political outlet for their antislavery beliefs. A mere eight years later, bolstered by the increasing slavery debate and growing sectional conflict, the party had grown to challenge the two mainstream political factions in many areas. In The Liberty Party, 1840–1848, Reinhard O. Johnson provides the first comprehensive history of this short-lived but important third party, detailing how it helped to bring the antislavery movement to the forefront of American politics and became the central institutional vehicle in the fight against slavery. As the major instrument of antislavery sentiment, the Liberty organization was more than a political party and included not only eligible voters but also disfranchised African Americans and women. Most party members held evangelical beliefs, and as Johnson relates, an intense religiosity permeated most of the group’s activities. He discusses the party’s founding and its national growth through the presidential election of 1844; its struggles to define itself amid serious internal disagreements over philosophy, strategy, and tactics in the ensuing years; and the reasons behind its decline and merger into the Free Soil coalition in 1848. Informative appendices include statewide results for all presidential and gubernatorial elections between 1840 and 1848, the Liberty Party’s 1844 platform, and short biographies of every Liberty member mentioned in the main text. Epic in scope and encyclopedic in detail, The Liberty Party, 1840–1848 is an invaluable reference for anyone interested in nineteenth-century American politics.

Since the arrival of its first settler in 1829, the story of Kalamazoo has been an interesting one. Out of the southwest Michigan wilderness, a small 19th century village quickly blossomed into a 20th century city. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a wide variety of industries made Kalamazoo a boomtown. Everything from paper, corsets, taxicabs, and pharmaceuticals allowed Kalamazoo to develop into a major center of manufacturing. At the same time, several colleges that would establish the area as a center for education were organized and expanded. Fortunately, much of Kalamazoo's development has been well-documented through photographs and other visual illustrations. These images are the subjects of this volume, which is organized to show the varied elements of Kalamazoo's history. Gathered from local archives and private collections, most of these rare photographs have never before been published.

It's early springtime in the forest. The snow is melting, and the sweet maple trees are budding. Join a young girl as she discovers the magic of transforming sap to syrup.