The inspirational story of an African American community that migrated from the Deep South to Albany, New York, in the 1930s.

Southern Life, Northern City: The History of Albany's Rapp Road Community

History

Lemak, Jennifer A.

Americas

Excelsior Editions/State University of New York Press

Chronicles the Civil War experiences of four brothers from New York’s Hudson Valley. Looking at the lives of the four Ross brothers, dedicated Union soldiers from upstate New York’s Washington County, Lincoln’s Veteran Volunteers Win the War offers a dramatic, in-depth account of struggle, devotion, family, and faith during the American Civil War. Three of the four brothers―Daniel, Melancton, and William―were among the two hundred thousand who enlisted for three years when the war broke out, and then reenlisted as battle-hardened Veteran Volunteers. The fourth brother, John, would sign up as soon as he reached the age of eighteen, and fought until the war’s end. The Ross brothers and their regiments fought in nearly every major engagement of the conflict, including Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, and Missionary Ridge. Using public documents, regimental histories, and personal sources that comprise hundreds of letters and personal narratives written by the Ross brothers and many other soldiers, author D. Reid Ross (grandson of Daniel) provides detailed and vivid descriptions of soldiers’ attitudes toward President Lincoln and emancipation, courage and performance on the battlefield, the hardships of army life, the role of the Veteran Volunteers, and the Grand Review in Washington, D.C. after the end of the war. Also included is the story of captured Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s journey to prison as described by his guard, Daniel Ross. Demonstrating the Ross brothers’ unflinching belief in home, family, country, and duty, and, as the culmination of thirty years of research, this fascinating book offers a view of the Civil War that is expansive, personal, and inspirational.

Lincoln's Veteran Volunteers Win the War: The Hudson Valley's Ross Brothers and the Union's Fight for Emancipation

Biographies & Memoirs

Ross, D. Reid

Historical

Fascinating stories based on the author’s exploration of eight rivers in New York and Québec. In Living Waters, Margaret Wooster canoes, portages, camps beside, and wades into eight Great Lakes watersheds across New York and Québec, returning with her pockets full of original stories from these beautiful, boggy, and prehistoric waterways. From the history of hydropower development on the Niagara River to the search for a wizard’s cave in the Zoar Valley, from a portrait of an urban creek in Buffalo, to the origins and demise of New France on the St. Lawrence, Living Waters offers a fascinating, first-person exploration of the rivers that impact our world’s largest freshwater ecosystem.

Living Waters: Reading the Rivers of the Lower Great Lakes (Excelsior Editions)

Business & Money

Wooster, Margaret

Economics

An inside story of privilege, inherited wealth, and the bizarre values and customs of the American upper crust. We Used to Own the Bronx tells the story of a woman born into the proprieties of an East Coast dynasty who nevertheless leaves her world of privilege for a career as an investigative reporter. Recounting her upbringing, Eve Pell offers an inside look at the bizarre values and customs of the American aristocracy, from debutante balls and the belowstairs hierarchy of the servant class to the fanatical pursuit of blood sports and private men’s clubs whose members were cared for like sultans. In the patriarchal world of the upper crust, girls were expected to flatter and defer to boys and men: her scholar-athlete sister was offered a racehorse if she would refuse to attend college. A parade of eccentrics populates the book, from the cockfighting stepfather who ran away from boarding school with a false beard and a stolen motorcycle to the Brahmin great-uncle who secretly organized the servants in Tuxedo Park to vote for Teddy Roosevelt. But as she moved beyond the narrow world she was expected to inhabit, Pell encountered people and ideas that brought her into conflict with her past. Equally unconventional are the muckrakers and revolutionaries she met in the 1960s and 1970s, and her subsequent adventures and misadventures while working with radical activists to reform the California prison system. As Pell traces her absorbing journey from debutante to working mother, from the upper crust of the East Coast to the radical activists of the West, from a life of wealth and privilege to one of trying to make ends meet, she provides exceptional insight into the prickly and complex issues of social class in America.

We Used to Own the Bronx: Memoirs of a Former Debutante

Pell, Eve

Community & Culture

First published epic poem by John Neihardt

The Divine Enchantment

Literature & Fiction

Neihardt, John G.

Poetry

Life's Lure

Genre Fiction

The Song of Hugh Glass

Epic poem about mountain men explorers in the American West

The Song of Three Friends

Second volume of the epic poem A Cycle of the West, covering the valiant resistance by Plains Indians

The Twilight of the Sioux: A Cycle of the West II

Neihardt, John Gneisenau

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Books by Excelsior Editions/State University of New York Press