Alamosa Public Library

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America.

"[A]n epic novel of love and heroism and hope, set against the backdrop of one of America's most defining eras--the Great Depression. Texas, 1934. Millions are out of work and a drought has broken the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as the crops are failing, the water is drying up, and dust threatens to bury them all. One of the darkest periods of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl era, has arrived with...

In the 1920s, Henry Ford hired thousands of African American men for his open-shop system of auto manufacturing. This move was a rejection of the notion that better jobs were for white men only. In The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford, Beth Tompkins Bates explains how black Detroiters, newly arrived from the South, seized the economic opportunities offered by Ford in the hope of gaining greater economic security. As these workers came...

"The National Road is a collection of essays about American places, each dealing with contentious matters: religion, politics, sex, race, poverty, loss and the stubborn persistence of national pride, despite abundant reasons for cynicism. An important question lies at the heart of this collection: what does it mean to "belong" in America in the midst of an era when rootedness to a particular piece of ground means less than at any time during our history?...

"America is stuck: just look at our crumbling roads and bridges, mismanaged railways, old-fashioned and easily overloaded air traffic control system, and perpetual lack of political will to do anything about it all. In contrast, take a trip around the world. Whiz through the Chunnel connecting England and France, get high-speed Internet and cell service on a remote mountain in Turkey, or travel in a driverless Mercedes in Germany, and see a future...

Introduces readers to the skills and technology that came together to help the people and animals escaping the 2018 California wildfires. Simple text and incredible close-up photographs focus on the amazing rescue work.

The Mississippi River Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in American history. In the spring of 1927, the river broke out of its earthen embankments in 145 places and inundated 27,000 square miles. Part of its legacy was the forced exodus of displaced sharecroppers, who left plantation life and migrated to Northern cities, adapting to an industrial society with its own set of challenges. Musically, the Great Migration fueled the evolution...

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. She interviewed more than a thousand individuals, and gained access to new data...

"Bound Away offers a new understanding of the westward movement. After Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis celebrating the frontier as the source of American freedom and democracy and the iconoclasm of the new western historians who dismissed the idea of the frontier as merely a mask for conquest and exploitation, David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly take a third approach to the subject. They share with Turner the idea of the westward movement as...