In 1791, a group of elite Bostonian men established the first historical society in the nation. Within sixty years, the number of local history organizations had increased exponentially, with states and territories from Maine to Louisiana and Georgia to Minnesota boasting collections of their own. With in-depth research and an expansive scope, Rescued from Oblivion offers a vital account of the formation of historical culture and consciousness in the early United States, re-centering in the record groups long marginalized from the national memory. As Alea Henle demonstrates, these societies laid the groundwork for professional practices that are still embraced today: collection policies, distinctions between preservation of textual and nontextual artifacts, publication programs, historical rituals and commemorations, reconciliation of scholarly and popular approaches, and more. At the same time, officers of these early societies faced challenges to their historical authority from communities interested in preserving a broader range of materials and documenting more inclusive histories, including fellow members, popular historians, white women, and peoples of color.

Tack and Richardson show you how to start with a batch of plain cupcakes, and turn them into fun creations such as robots, farm- or zoo-animals, and even a cookie village! --Adapted from back cover.

This book is written in the form of a memoir and covers the events in the life of its author, Vilma Vukelić from her earliest childhood (she was born in 1880) to 15 August 1904, the day her first child, Branko was born. It is a contribution to women’s history in the form of a portrait of an intelligent young woman and a burgeoning feminist resisting social norms imposed on women of her generation. It is a contribution to the history of central and southeastern Europe with its spirited descriptions of the bourgeois life in Osijek, a small provincial town by the River Drava close to the Hungarian-Croatian border, at the outskirts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is a contribution to Jewish history, with the specific emphasis on the life in various Jewish settlements in central and eastern Europe. The author describes late nineteenth-century Jewish optimistic attempts towards social integration and full acceptance by the surrounding society—hopes and expectations tragically shattered soon after. It is a lively account of a happy childhood, full of colourful descriptions of a little girl’s discoveries of the wonderful as well as bleak aspects of life. There is also an account of life in an elite boarding school in Vienna and a romantic love story. www.vilmavukelic.com

In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try. On a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois. A man named Lloyd Wilson has been killed. And the tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers—one privileged yet neglected, the other a troubled farm boy—has been shattered. Fifty years later, one of those boys—now a grown man—tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder. In doing so, he is inevitably drawn back to his lost friend Cletus, who has the misfortune of being the son of Wilson's killer and who in the months before witnessed things that Maxwell's narrator can only guess at. Out of memory and imagination, the surmises of children and the destructive passions of their parents, Maxwell creates a luminous American classic of youth and loss.