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Through rare and historic images, Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade offers readers a chance to reminisce, explore, and delight in eighty years of this thoroughly American celebration.

""Let's have a parade"" is the phrase that begins a beloved American tradition, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. In 1924, employees of the R. H. Macy and Company store in Herald Square, many of whom were immigrants and first-generation Americans, chose to give thanks for their good fortune in a manner reminiscent of the festive parades held in their native countries. The excitement and praise from crowds lining the route that first year led Macy's to issue an immediate proclamation: the parade would become a tradition. Before the parade's first decade passed, Macy's welcomed the huge and spectacular helium character balloons that became its goodwill ambassadors. Since then, the parade has become a world-famous treasure.

New York State was a center of industry during World War II. New York aviation companies designed many of the greatest combat aircraft of the era, and bustling armies of women and men helped quickly churn them out by the thousands. More than one fourth of all US warplanes came from New York drawing boards during the war. These planes saw combat service everywhere, holding the line in the deserts of North Africa and flying from aircraft carriers plying the vast Pacific Ocean. Others operated over the frozen tundra of Alaska and Siberia. New York aircraft flew tons of fuel, ammunition, and supplies over the treacherous Himalayan Mountains into China, relentlessly hounded enemy submarines and ships, and battered Axis strongholds all the way to victory.

Opened in 1913, Grand Central Terminal is a world-famous landmark building with a magnificent 48-foot-high, 1,500-ton statuary group on top of the main facade.

Designed by sculptor Jules-Felix Coutan, a 13-foot-wide Tiffany clock serves as the centerpiece.The figure above the clock is Mercury, with Hercules to the left and Minerva to the right.In the late 1990s, a historic restoration was performed on the terminal after which two cast-iron eagle statues were placed over entrances at Lexington Avenue and Forty-Second Street/Vanderbilt Avenue.These eagles were from the 1898 Grand Central Station building that was demolished in 1910 to make room for the construction of the new Grand Central Terminal structure.Penn Station, which opened in 1910, covered two full city blocks and had statuary groups, designed by sculptor Adolph Weinman, on all four sides of the building.After Penn Station was demolished in the mid-1960s, the statuary was dispersed throughout various locations, mainly in the Northeast.

Located 50 miles southwest of Chicago, the Illinois Midland Railway connected Newark and Millington, two small towns surrounded by farmland barely two miles apart.

The Illinois Midland Railway began in 1914. Originally, plans called for a 120-mile railroad to be built across northern Illinois, connecting the cities of Rockford and Kankakee and bypassing congested Chicagoland rail traffic. A turbulent financial start resulted in just 1.962 miles of rickety track that meandered through forests, pastures, and across a creek. Townspeople there rescued the struggling railroad then ran it successfully under the tutelage of the Newark Farmers Grain Elevator Company, getting into record books along the way as “The World’s Shortest Railroad.” The end came in 1967, when vandals burned a couple of the railroad’s bridges. The Midland ceased operations, and the rails were removed, but again townspeople in Newark and Millington came to the rescue, each establishing museums to keep the memory of their Midland alive today.

Jeff Kehoe is a retired history teacher and active member in several railroad historical societies. Growing up in a Chicagoland railroad family, he has written stories for numerous publications. As a lifetime member of the Milwaukee Road Historical Association, he has written four books for that organization. This is his first book for Arcadia Publishing. The photographs and maps are courtesy of various sources, including the Fern Dell Museum in Newark, Millington Illinois Historical Museum, and the author’s own collection.

Nestled on the East Branch of the DuPage River in Naperville, Illinois, sits the Greene family homestead with a 14,000-square-foot barn, the largest one in DuPage County, and a farmhouse lovingly called Oak Cottage by the family.

One of the county’s earliest settlers, William Briggs Greene, acquired land in 1843 and developed the farmstead. Home to six generations of the Greene family, the homestead serves as a tribute to the courage and determination of the early settlers, who came in lumber wagons to the dense rolling prairie woodlands and learned how to farm and manage livestock. This book is also the story of William Bertram Greene, a father, grandfather, businessman, and philanthropist, who with his remarkable wisdom and foresight secured the preservation of the Greene homestead for future generations by donating it to the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County in 1971.

Revati Natesan, living across the street for 30 years, witnessed the weather beating down upon the Greene barn and Oak Cottage and the subsequent massive restoration efforts. Following a career as an electronics engineer at Bell Labs, she founded the ThinkGlobal Arts Foundation, which uses the arts as a medium to promote cultural awareness, peace, and harmony. The foundation organized citywide events across Naperville for several years celebrating peace and gifted a peace pole to the city that is installed in Veterans Park, Naperville.

The Morris Canal was not the longest canal in the world, but it did have one superlative to its credit—it climbed higher than any other canal ever built.

In its time, it was world famous, visited by tourists and technical people from as far away as Europe and Asia.For nearly 100 years, it crossed the hills of northern New Jersey, accomplishing that feat with 23 lift locks and 23 inclined planes.From Lake Hopatcong, the canal ran westward through the Musconetcong valley to Phillipsburg, on the Delaware River, and eastward through the valleys of the Rockaway and Passaic Rivers to tidewater at Newark and Jersey City—a little over 100 miles horizontally and a total rise and fall of nearly 1,700 feet vertically.The Morris Canal, once an important soldier in the American Industrial Revolution, has been gone for most of the 20th century, but its memory lives on in the many photographs, postcards, and other memorabilia that its unique presence inspired.

See how brothers Edward and Lincoln Filene brought fashion and entertainment to generations of Bostonians.

It was regarded as the ""World's Largest Specialty Store."" William Filene's Sons Company was founded in 1870 and brothers Edward and Lincoln Filene were revolutionaries who championed employee relations and innovative merchandising. In 1909, Edward organized and opened Filene's famous Automatic Bargain Basement, while Lincoln helped found the Federated Department Stores Company in March 1929. Filene's was a pioneer in branch-store development.

In its heyday, the store hosted appearances by fashion designers, such as Christian Dior, Pierre Cardin, and Pauline Trigère, in addition to celebrities, like Zsa Zsa Gabor, Gloria Swanson, and Gene Autry. A victim of retail consolidation, the flagship downtown Boston store closed its doors in 2006. Its building, designed by the internationally renowned architect Daniel Burnham, celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2012 and anxiously awaits its redevelopment. Now, you can see some of these historic photographs that come directly from the Filene Marketing Archives at the Boston Public Library.

Dive into the military history of Hill Air Force Base as author George Larson explores why this base in northern Utah has played such an important role in supporting the conflicts in both World Wars as well as in Korea and Vietnam, and has helped to develop the United States Air Force into what it is today.

Explore Florida's everglades, its history, the native tribes that called it home, and the fight to preserve the grassy wetlands documented through a collection of images.

The Everglades once blanketed a quarter of Florida. Stretching from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay, its saw grass prairies, mangrove swamps, and hammocks were home to a profusion of animals, plants, and prehistoric Native Americans, as well as Seminoles, Miccosukees, and Gladesmen of historic times. In 1904, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward ran for Florida governor with the political platform of creating farmland by dredging the Everglades and spilling its water into the ocean. By 1914, this spectacular natural feature was on the verge of destruction, and environmentalist May Mann Jennings led a grassroots movement to preserve Royal Palm Hammock. In the 1930s, Ernest Coe and Marjory Stoneman Douglas fought to preserve a larger area, culminating in the creation of Everglades National Park in 1947.