A line of nervous young women got off a ship in Victoria Harbour in 1862 and had to walk the gauntlet between two rows of jostling, eager men. One girl, proposed to on the spot, accepted equally quickly and left town with her new husband. Why did these women leave everything behind in England and come to the west coast? The answers lie in the lusty turmoil of a gold-rush frontier, the horrible disruptions of industrial England and the conflicting aims of earnest Christians and early British feminists.

A line of nervous young women got off a ship in Victoria Harbour in 1862 and had to walk the gauntlet between two rows of jostling, eager men. One girl, proposed to on the spot, accepted equally quickly and left town with her new husband. Why did these women leave everything behind in England and come to the west coast? The answers lie in the lusty turmoil of a gold-rush frontier, the horrible disruptions of industrial England and the conflicting aims of earnest Christians and early British feminists.

Hope doesn’t only want to listen to her father’s stories about his voyages at sea, she wants to be part of those stories. And so, unbeknownst to her parents, she stows away on her father's 19th-century merchant vessel. But look... The wind has picked up and the sky is darkening... Could there be such a thing as an adventure that is too exciting? Join high-spirited Hope on a trip of a lifetime in this exquisitely illustrated picture book that also captures the love between a father and child.

For too long we’ve lacked a compact, inexpensive, authoritative, and compulsively readable book that offers American readers a clear, informative, and inspiring narrative account of their country. Such a fresh retelling of the American story is especially needed today, to shape and deepen young Americans’ sense of the land they inhabit, help them to understand its roots and share in its memories, all the while equipping them for the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship in American society The existing texts simply fail to tell that story with energy and conviction. Too often they reflect a fragmented outlook that fails to convey to American readers the grand trajectory of their own history. This state of affairs cannot continue for long without producing serious consequences. A great nation needs and deserves a great and coherent narrative, as an expression of its own self-understanding and its aspirations; and it needs to be able to convey that narrative to its young effectively. Of course, it goes without saying that such a narrative cannot be a fairy tale of the past. It will not be convincing if it is not truthful. But as Land of Hope brilliantly shows, there is no contradiction between a truthful account of the American past and an inspiring one. Readers of Land of Hope will find both in its pages.