In 1775, renowned pioneer Daniel Boone was commissioned to blaze a road through the Appalachian and Cumberland Plateau regions as a fledgling American nation steadily pushed westward. What would come to be known as the Wilderness Road was the first major route into the West, and it allowed settlers to migrate northwest into Kentucky and later settle parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. In 2012, Jim Dahlman stopped to stretch his legs on a brief hike into the Cumberland Gap and stumbled upon an adventure. After months of preparation, Dahlman grabbed a pack and set out to hike as accurately as possible Daniel Boone’s original trace.

In A Familiar Wilderness, Dahlman illustrates that the Wilderness Road is more than an old track through Appalachia. Many of the towns grew up along Boone’s original footpath, and people in these areas can draw direct connections to Boone himself or to other early settlers who traversed this trans-Appalachian route. Dahlman uses these and other encounters to uncover the history of the Wilderness Road and show how we are all a product of our past.

The hospitality of strangers becomes especially instrumental in making Dahlman’s hike come alive. Robert, one such stranger, offers to personally guide Dahlman over Powell Mountain. As they make their ascent, Robert provides a splendid view of the mountain, blending careful observation of their surroundings with deep knowledge of the place. A finale to Dahlman’s almost 300-mile hike occurs on Hackberry Ridge overlooking Fort Boonesborough State Park—a fitting tribute to Boone’s own arrival on the ridge famously overlooking a herd of buffalo.

A Familiar Wilderness takes readers on a winding path where geography, history, and local memory intersect with daily life, and Dahlman’s lively writing, sensitive to every detail, will bring readers into thrilling touch with a past that still shapes and challenges the present.

This is the first complete modern edition of The Female Marine, a fictional cross-dressing trilogy originally published between 1815 and 1818. Enormously popular among New England readers, the tale in various versions appeared in no fewer than nineteen editions over that brief four-year span. This new edition appends three other contemporary accounts of cross-dressing and urban vice which, together with The Female Marine, provide a unique portrayal of prostitution and interracial city life in early-nineteenth-century America.

The alternately racy and moralistic narrative recounts the adventures of a young woman from rural Massachusetts who is seduced by a false-hearted lover, flees to Boston, and is entrapped in a brothel. She eventually escapes by disguising herself as a man and serves with distinction on board the U.S. frigate Constitution during the War of 1812. After subsequent onshore adventures in and out of male dress, she is happily married to a wealthy New York gentleman.

In his introduction, Daniel A. Cohen situates the story in both its literary and historical contexts. He explains how the tale draws upon a number of popular Anglo-American literary genres, including the female warrior narrative, the sentimental novel, and the urban exposé. He then explores how The Female Marine reflects early-nineteenth-century anxieties concerning changing gender norms, the expansion of urban prostitution, the growth of Boston's African American community, and feelings of guilt aroused by New England's notoriously unpatriotic activities during the War of 1812.

Flower Growing in the North was first published in 1956. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Since home gardeners living in regions of very cold winters and short growing seasons find little attention paid to their special problems in most gardening books, they will welcome this month-by-month guide. It relates times of planting, needs for winter protection, and selection of plant varieties to the limitations of the northern climate. The best of George Luxton's popular gardening columns in the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune form the basis of the book. For the winter season there is advice on the care of house plants and how to grow seedlings for transplanting outdoors. For the summer gardener there is information about annuals and perennials, fertilizers and insecticides, and garden equipment. Instructions on tree, shrub, and lawn care are given, too. Also included are many of the "Grandma sayings" from Mr. Luxton's newspaper columns. These homely bits of garden lore, which stem from his recollections of his own grandmother, are as intriguing and useful today as they were a generation of two ago.

In this second volume on the aster family, botanist Robert H. Mohlenbrock recognizes 133 species in 42 genera, as well as 7 hybrids and 29 lesser taxa. Flowering Plants: Asteraceae, Part 2 provides an easy-to-use key to the genera and species and a complete description and nomenclatural and habitat notes for each plant, including its usefulness, if applicable. The book details the most important features of the species and includes common, locally used names. Synonyms that have been applied to species and lesser taxa in Illinois are given for each species.
 
In addition, Mohlenbrock has identified the overall range for each species in Illinois, compiled from various sources, including examinations of herbarium material and Mohlenbrock’s own field studies. The range is given from the northeastern to the northwestern extremities, south to the southwestern limit, and then eastward to the southeastern limit. 
 
As important to amateurs interested in wildflower identification as to botanists and land planners, this second volume of Mohlenbrock’s Asteraceae is an essential addition to the esteemed Illustrated Flora of Illinois series.
 

Winner, ISHS Best of Illinois History Award, 2019

This first-ever pictorial record of the people and methods of the Illinois-Kentucky Fluorspar District from the 1900s to the 1990s covers early and modern means of extracting, hoisting, processing, and transporting the mineral from mine mouth to end user. Nearly one hundred images carefully selected by author Herbert K. Russell show early pick-and-shovel extraction and open-flame lighting as well as primitive drilling methods and transportation by barrels, buckets, barges, mule teams, and trams, in addition to the use of modern equipment and sophisticated refinement procedures such as froth flotation. Russell also provides an overview of the many industrial uses of fluorspar, from metal work by ancient Romans to the processing of uranium by scientists seeking to perfect the atomic bomb. Preserving what is known about the industry by miners, managers, and museums, this detailed and fascinating pictorial history looks both above and below ground at fluorspar mining.
 

An exhaustive guide to all aspects of the freshwater mussel fauna in Florida, Freshwater Mussels of Florida covers the ecology, biology, distribution, and conservation of the many species of bivalve mollusks in the Sunshine State. In the past three decades, researchers, the public, businesses that depend on wildlife, and policy makers have given more attention to the threatened natural diversity of the Southeast, including freshwater mussels. This compendium meets the increasingly urgent need to catalog this imperiled group of aquatic organisms in the United States.
 
Each entry in this definitive guide provides a detailed description and multiple depictions of the species as well as select characteristics of its soft anatomy and miscellaneous notes of interest. Individual distribution maps pinpoint the historical and present occurrence of each bivalve species and are just one component of the rich set of 307 mussel and habitat photographs, seventy-four maps, and thirteen tables that illustrate the book. Of particular interest are remarkable electron micrographs of glochidia, the specialized larval life history stage parasitic upon fishes.
 
Freshwater Mussels of Florida will be of lasting value to state and federal conservation agencies as well as other government and nongovernment entities that manage aquatic resources in Florida. The research provides a key baseline for future study of Florida mussels. The survey results in this guide, along with extensive reviews of historical mussel collections in natural history museums, provide a complete picture of the Florida mussel fauna, past and present.