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"San Francisco is forty-nine square miles surrounded by reality.'? -Paul Kantner, founder of San Francisco rock band Jefferson Airplane.

Surging from hamlet to boomtown overnight, San Francisco is the most meteoric "instant city'? in history. Over the decades, residents have offered unique perspectives through journals, letters, and newspapers, their words bringing another time to life. Discover San Francisco through the eyes of miners and "ladies of the night.'? Relive the experiences of robber barons and beatniks who flourished in this tiny corner of the world with fewer than one million souls. From the Gold Rush to the Tech Rush, the city by the bay been the site of daring innovations, counterculture upheavals, and social rebellions that shaped generations.

With commentary, background and extraordinary images, historians Terry Hamburg and Richard Hansen guide you through these colorful quotes, showing San Francisco as it once was, and what it aspired to be.

African Americans have lived in Boyle County, Kentucky, since the first settlement of the area in 1775. Mostly enslaved, by the Civil War, the county had one of the largest population of free Blacks in the area with the exception of Jefferson and Fayette Counties.

Their presence in Danville, the county seat, but also in population centers scattered throughout the county resulted in a deep and broad influence, much of which was lost in the early 1900s due to out-migration, deaths, and especially urban renewal between 1963 and 1975. Within Danville, the South Second Street area was the heart of the Black community. Restaurants, groceries, pool halls, barbershops, and beauty shops were the center of commerce from the 1890s until the 1970s. The Bate School also drew students from the outlying settlements that did not have high schools of their own. Today, the majority of the African American community continues to live in the city of Danville, with small pockets in Perryville and outlying areas of Boyle County.

Michael Thomas Hughes is a native of Boyle County and grew up in a segregated society. Michael J. Denis is a retired history teacher from Maine who moved to Boyle County and immediately fell in love with its history. The photographs in this book are mostly from the Danville Boyle County African American Historical Society Inc. collection (DBCAAHS), of which the authors are charter members.

A sleek volume that expands our understanding of the Midwest through the writers who have portrayed it. Hailed by The Chicago Tribune for seeing the Midwest for what it really is.

In the public imagination, Midwestern literature has not evolved far beyond stories of heartland laborers and hardscrabble immigrants from past centuries. But as the region has changed, so has its fiction. In this book, Mark Athitakis explores how shifts in work, class, place, race, and culture have been reflected or ignored by contemporary novelists and short story writers. Authors Athitakis considers include Marilynne Robinson, Toni Morrison, Jane Smiley, Leon Forrest, Aleksandar Hemon, Bonnie Jo Campbell, and Stewart O'Nan.

This book is a call to reconsider the way we think about Midwestern fiction, and one that is sure to prompt some new must-have additions to your reading list.

This masterpiece of naturalism offers an unblinking portrait of the American Midwest during a time of intense change. Part of Belt's Revivals Series and with a new introduction by Brianne Jacquette.

Originally published in 1891, Main-Travelled Roads includes 11 short stories set in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, or the region of America Hamlin Garland called the Middle Border. Depicting an agrarian life of exploitation, misogyny, and poverty, Garland's radical, realist stories--written in a mode he called veritism--refute romantic conceptions of the rural Midwest. Unrelenting, yet strangely hopeful in its view of how things ought to be, this collection is gripping, hard-hitting, and surprisingly beautiful.

An intriguing look at an era of intense change, Main-Travelled Roads was Garland's first major success, a little-known classic of American literature and the Midwest.

A part of Belt's City Anthology Series, A Detroit Anthology offers a unique take on the Motor City told by longtime residents and newcomers, including activists, teachers, artists, and students--a 2015 Michigan Notable Book.

People have long told stories about Detroit, but too often those stories are from outsiders looking in, telling the city what it's all about. In A Detroit Anthology, Anna Clark, a Detroit-based journalist for ProPublica, collects the kinds of stories about the Motor City that people tell at the bar, waiting at the bus stop, sitting on their porch, or at church social hours. Featuring essays, photographs, art, and poetry by Tyehimba Jess, Grace Lee Boggs, Aaron Foley, John Carlisle, Desiree Cooper, Dream Hampton, Tracie McMillan, and many others. The Millions describes it as a book that gives voice to people who now live or once lived in this fascinating, tortured place, the survivors, good people who know what pain is, people who understand that the city exerts an undying pull on them. The Detroit stories here might not all be glowing or gloomy, but they're 100% real.

A wide-ranging and diverse portrait of a city, perfect for those who want to get to know Detroit for the first time or for those native Detroiters who want a more candid look at the city they call home.

Part of Belt's City Anthology Series. Absolutely one of the best books about Buffalo ever created.--Buffalo News

Buffalo, New York, sits atop a glorious history of power, disappointment, artistic flair, racial injustice, and spicy chicken wings--and all with Niagara Falls in its backyard. Told through the eyes of more than 65 artists, writers, and residents, the essays, poems, and photographs in Right Here, Right Now offer an unblinking, personal portrait of this often-overlooked city, both its good and bad sides. Edited by Jody K. Biehl, contributions from Wolf Blitzer, Lauren Belfer, Marv Levy, John Lombardo, Mary Ramsey, Robby Takac, and many more show why so many people love calling Buffalo home. Here, you'll encounter:

- Frederick Law Olmsted's impact on the city's early design

- The pain and joy of biking through Lake Effect snow

- Racism in a gentrifying city and city planning initiatives

- The rise and fall of the Buffalo mafia

- A trip to a Western New York meat raffle.

Touching on the meaning of home and how to find it, this collection offers an honest look at where Buffalo's been, where it is today, and where it may be going next.

An insiders' kaleidoscopic portrait of a messy, magnetic, and magical city.

A part of Belt's City Anthology Series, a unique take on the South Dakota town residents call the Best Little City in America.

In 1992, Money magazine named Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the best place to live in America. This rich anthology offers an inside look at the city through the eyes of both longtime residents and recent transplants. In over forty-five essays, you'll hear stories about the city's past, including the region's legacy of violence against Native Americans and Sioux Falls's status as a divorce destination in the late 1800s. But you'll also discover the ways the city's savvy planning and entrepreneurial gumption have helped it navigate twenty-first-century challenges. You'll read about: - the end of George McGovern's presidential run at a Sioux Falls Holiday Inn - the vibrant Jewish and Syrian-Muslim communities that helped form the city - the first sit-down strike in American labor history - firsthand accounts of how South Sudanese refugees are shaping the city today Edited by Patrick Hicks and Jon K. Lauck, City of Hustle: A Sioux Falls Anthology gives an insider's perspective on what's really going on in so-called flyover country, and it shows why that name misses so much of the true richness that makes up life there every day.

From Erin Keane, editor in chief at Salon, comes a touching memoir about the search for truths in the stories families tell. In 1970, Erin Keane's mother ran away from home for the first time. She was thirteen years old. Over the next several years, and under two assumed identities, she hitchhiked her way across America, experiencing freedom, hardship, and tragedy. At fifteen, she met a man in New York City and married him. He was thirty-six.  Though a deft balance of journalistic digging, cultural criticism, and poetic reimagining, Keane pieces together the true story of her mother's teenage years, questioning almost everything she's been told about her parents and their relationship. Along the way, she also considers how pop culture has kept similar narratives alive in her. At stake are some of the most profound questions we can ask ourselves: What's true? What gets remembered? Who gets to tell the stories that make us who we are?  Whether it's talking about painful family history, #MeToo, Star Wars, true crime forensics, or The Gilmore Girls, Runaway is an unforgettable look at all the different ways the stories we tell--both personal and pop cultural--create us.

A part of Belt's City Anthology Series, The Dayton Anthology offers a portrait of a city recovering from the twin 2019 crises of devastating tornadoes and the mass shooting that took the lives of nine residents in the Oregon District.

In over fifty essays and poems, contributors reflect on these traumas and the longer-term ills of disinvestment and decay that have plagued Dayton and the Miami Valley for years. But they also draw our attention to the resilience of the people who call Dayton home. This is the city that brought the world the Wright brothers' invention of flight, the cash register, and the hydraulic pump. It also gave us the soaring poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and the comedy of Dave Chappelle. Edited by Shannon Shelton Miller and with contributions from Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley and former Ohio Governor Bob Taft.

A delightful tour of a city that never counts itself out, that captures the true diversity of Dayton's residents.

A groundbreaking nonfiction collection about queer life in the Midwest. A marvelous ode to humanity and its passions.--Little Village

The middle of America―the Midwest, Appalachia, the Rust Belt, the Great Plains, the Upper South―is a queer place, and it always has been. The queer people of its cities, farms, and suburbs can't be reduced to just blue dots within red states. Every story about a kid from Iowa who steps off the bus in Manhattan, ready to finally live, is a story about a kid who was already living in Iowa. Sweeter Voices Still is a collection full of stories about that kid, written by people just like them.

This collection, edited by Ryan Schuessler (The St. Louis Anthology) and Kevin Whiteneir, Jr., features queer voices you might recognize―established and successful writers and thinkers like Aaron Foley and Jeffery Bean―and others you might not. You'll find sex, love, and heartbreak and all the other beings we meet along the way: trees, deer, cicadas, sturgeon. Most of all, you'll find real people.

Perfect for anyone looking for fully realized stories about the nuanced, joyous complexity of queer identity in the Midwest.

A dazzling portrait of a Midwestern city whose relationships among socio-economics, religion, civil rights, and class are consistently complex. A part of Belt's City Anthology Series.

St. Louis is a fragmented place. It's physically dissected by rivers, highways, walls, and fences, but it's also a place where one's race, class, religion, and zip code may as well be cards in a rigged poker game, where the winners' prize is the ability to ignore the fact that the losers have drastically shorter life expectancies. But it can also be a city of warmth, love, and beauty―especially in its contrasts.

Edited by Ryan Schuessler (Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology from Middle America), the collection features nearly 70 essays penned by St. Louis writers, journalists, clerics, poets, and activists including Aisha Sultan, Galen Gritts, Vivian Gibson, Maja Sadikovic, Nartana Premachandra, Sophia Benoit, Robert Langellier, Samuel Autman, Umar Lee, and more. Here you'll learn about:

- The rent strike of 1969

- Religious life in Pruitt-Igoe public housing

- Protest art in Ferguson

- Segregation in the Vandeventer neighborhood

- A church closing in Kinloch.

The St. Louis Anthology dares to confront the city's nostalgia and its traumas, celebrating those who have faced both who live complex lives in this city against a backdrop of its red brick, muddy rivers, and sticky summer nights when the symphony of cicadas and jazz is almost loud enough to drown out the gunshots.

A perfect introduction to St. Louis for people who want to learn more about it and a great resource for those people from St. Louis who want to hear stories told by their own neighbors.

Who We Lost is the first book that directly acknowledges the free-floating grief of the COVID-bereaved, affirms that it must be addressed, and offers a purposeful activity that respects mourners as well as the mourned. 

In 2020, Martha Greenwald invited mourners to write memories of loved ones lost to COVID on the Who We Lost website. The site has been growing ever since, as the bereaved continue to write and publish stories, and the writers’ toolbox section of the website offers guidance and prompts for anyone wishing to contribute their story about who they lost to this grassroots public memorial. 

The resultant book, Who We Lost: A Portable COVID Memorial, contains dozens of essays and a writing guide for those wishing to add their own story about a loved one who died from COVID. It is a community-generated tribute, a eulogy, a handbook, and a collective memorial.

The Youngstown story often is told with a beginning in iron and steel and ending in decay with a subplot driven by violent mobsters and corrupt politicians. Aiming to provide a more well-rounded examination of Youngstown, this collection of essays provides an authentic look at the city through a diverse set of experiences from the perspectives of those who have lived there. Readers will gain a sense of the past, present, and future of the city. Edited by Jacqueline Marino and Will Miller, the book features contributions by Christopher Barzak, Rochelle Hurt, Eric Murphy, Ed O’Neill, Sarah Sepanek, David Skolnick, Sarah Stankorb, C Lee Tressell, Jay Williams, Andrea Wood & 35 others.

Lauderdale-By-The-Sea depicts the engaging history of this oceanfront community.

Located on Florida's Gold Coast, Lauderdale-By-The-Sea is noted for its beach activities, living reef system, and family-oriented lifestyle. The quiet beauty of the sea and sand amid friendly low-rise lodgings and quaint stores and restaurants draws visitors to this thriving paradise year-round. Lauderdale-By-The-Sea developed slowly around the original platted land set down by William F. Morang in 1924 as he and others promoted a land boom. The completion of the Flagler Railroad by 1900 paved the way for regional growth. Lauderdale-By-The-Sea lacked a railroad terminal and remained undeveloped in the early years. Melvin I. Anglin pioneered in chartering the town in 1927 and became its first mayor. Two hurricanes and the 1929 stock market crash burst the real estate bubble, leading to the demise of the charter in 1933. In 1947, citizens drew up a new charter that was certified by the state legislature two years later. Construction of the Anglin Pier in 1941 and the Commercial Boulevard Bridge over the Intracoastal Waterway in 1965 broke down the isolation of the town. Annexation of the unincorporated area north to Pompano Beach completed its growth cycle.

Flushing explores the dramatic changes of this ever growing city with many never-before-seen images. Jason D. Antos is the author of three other local Queens history books.

In the 1890s, electric lighting and improved roads were just the beginning of the changes about to take place in Flushing, New York. Once a rural village of wide-open farms and magnificent estates, Flushing transformed into a community of more than 200,000 people and quickly became one of the busiest neighborhoods in Queens.

Choctaw County, one of Alabama's largest counties by area at 909 square miles, is also one of the smallest in population.

Established at the end of 1847 by taking land from Sumter and Washington Counties, Choctaw County today is a recognized leader in the pulpwood industry and renowned for its hunting and fishing. Cattle farming and agriculture also play a large role in daily life and economics, and residents take pride in having the first producing oil well in the state of Alabama. Choctaw County is even home to the remains of the historic healing waters of the former Bladon Springs Hotel, and a curious connection with the basilosaurus cetoides, a prehistoric sea mammal found near Melvin, currently on display in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.