The Last Children of Mill Creek


Book Description

Vivian Gibson grew up in Mill Creek, a neighborhood of St. Louis razed in 1955 to build a highway. Her family, friends, church community, and neighbors were all displaced by urban renewal. In this moving memoir, Gibson recreates the every day lived experiences of her family, including her college-educated mother, who moved to St. Louis as part of the Great Migration, her friends, shop owners, teachers, and others who made Mill Creek into a warm, tight-knit, African-American community, and reflects upon what it means that Mill Creek was destroyed by racism and "urban renewal."




The Mill Creek Kids 1


Book Description

The Great River Adventure Tom Austin, Paul Ford and Vera Smith are looking for an adventure. A story told by Gramps inspires them to build a raft and float it down the river; in search of buried treasure. Finding stolen money and being held captive by bank robbers was the last thing they were looking for. When they're forced at gunpoint to take the bank robbers downriver, things get real exciting. Knowing there's a water fall not to far beyond Waterville, Tom tries to convince the two bank robbers their idea is a bad one. The bank robbers think he's trying to pull a trick on them and force him to continue downriver right towards the falls and certain death. Join the Mill Creek kids in The Great River Adventure and find out how they learn to trust God with their lives. Tom resides in upstate New York with his wife Vera. They have worked together in children's ministries for the last twenty-four years. Tom has written several Mill Creek Kids short stories for the children he and Vera teach in their children's church class. The children have enjoyed the short stories so much that Tom decided to write a collection of full-length Mill Creek kids stories.




Children of the Mill


Book Description

Channel 4's The Mill captivated viewers with the tales of the lives of the young girls and boys in a northern mill. Focusing on the lives of the apprentices at Quarry Bank Mill, David Hanson's book uses a wealth of first-person source material including letters, diaries, mill records, to tell the stories of the children who lived and worked at Quarry Bank throughout the nineteenth century. This book perfectly accompanies the television series, satisfying viewers' curiosity about the history of the children of Quarry Bank. It reveals the real lives of the television series' main characters: Esther, Daniel, Lucy and Susannah, showing how shockingly close to the truth the dramatisation is. But the book also goes far beyond this to create a full and vivid picture of factory life in the industrial revolution. David Hanson has written an accessible narrative history of Victorian working children and the conditions in which they worked.




The Mill Creek


Book Description

Flowing through the heart of Cincinnati to the Ohio River, the Mill Creek is one of the most severely polluted & physically degraded urban streams in the United States. The book is a valuable case study on how human activity & land use impact water resources over time. It chronicles the stream's environmental history, beginning with a description of the creek's geological past & its pristine ecosystem in the early 1700s. The author examines the environmental impacts of forest clearcutting by early settlers, of industrialization & of channelization of the creek by the Army Corps of Engineers. The book ends with a summary of present day environmental problems & outlines a restoration strategy for repairing the damage. "This book will become the foundation for restoration work ahead & provides a model for people working to reclaim other streams in cities in crisis across the United States," said Paul Labovitz, Rivers, Trails & Conservation Assistance Program, National Park Service. "This volume will be useful to students in a variety of disciplines, including history, environmental & urban history, political science, regional & city planning, biology & to general readers concerned with environmental issues," said Zane L. Miller, Professor of History & Director, Center for Neighborhood & Community Studies, University of Cincinnati. Order from RUMCRP, Two Centennial Plaza #610, 805 Central Avenue, Cincinnati, OH 45202; (513) 352-1588.




Mill Creek Kids Count to Ten


Book Description

Children's rhyming counting book with 15 original artworks by Phyllis Guerrieri




Best Hikes with Kids


Book Description

CLICK HERE to download two sample hikes from Best Hikes with Kids San Francisco * Features more than 100 kid-friendly trails * A comprehensive guide for families hiking in the Bay Area! In this colorful guidebook to the best family trails in the entire Bay Area -- including Sonoma and Santa Cruz counties -- author Laure Latham developed her list of hikes not just through personal experience, but also by interviewing local parent groups to hear what families really want when they hike with kids. Beyond detailed trail descriptions, Best Hikes with Kids: San Francisco Bay Area features: * Info on junior ranger/kid recognition programs * Guidebook section on environmental awareness for kids * Trail safety and how to easily identify poison oak and poison hemlock * Stroller-friendly and dog-friendly hikes * Trails near campgrounds, playgrounds, or quality picnic areas * Best hikes accessible via Bay Area public transit * Best hikes with nearby farms or nature museums —







Fighting Over the Founders


Book Description

Explores how politicians, screenwriters, activists, biographers, jurists, museum professionals, and reenactors portray the American Revolution. The American Revolution is all around us. It is pictured as big as billboards and as small as postage stamps, evoked in political campaigns and car advertising campaigns, relived in museums and revised in computer games. As the nation’s founding moment, the American Revolution serves as a source of powerful founding myths, and remains the most accessible and most contested event in US history: more than any other, it stands as a proxy for how Americans perceive the nation’s aspirations. Americans’ increased fascination with the Revolution over the past two decades represents more than interest in the past. It’s also a site to work out the present, and the future. What are we using the Revolution to debate? In Fighting over the Founders, Andrew M. Schocket explores how politicians, screenwriters, activists, biographers, jurists, museum professionals, and reenactors portray the American Revolution. Identifying competing “essentialist” and “organicist” interpretations of the American Revolution, Schocket shows how today’s memories of the American Revolution reveal Americans' conflicted ideas about class, about race, and about gender—as well as the nature of history itself. Fighting over the Founders plumbs our views of the past and the present, and illuminates our ideas of what United States means to its citizens in the new millennium.




The Dead End Kids of St. Louis


Book Description

Joe Garagiola remembers playing baseball with stolen balls and bats while growing up on the Hill. Chuck Berry had run-ins with police before channeling his energy into rock and roll. But not all the boys growing up on the rough streets of St. Louis had loving families or managed to find success. This book reviews a century of history to tell the story of the “lost” boys who struggled to survive on the city’s streets as it evolved from a booming late-nineteenth-century industrial center to a troubled mid-twentieth-century metropolis. To the eyes of impressionable boys without parents to shield them, St. Louis presented an ever-changing spectacle of violence. Small, loosely organized bands from the tenement districts wandered the city looking for trouble, and they often found it. The geology of St. Louis also provided for unique accommodations—sometimes gangs of boys found shelter in the extensive system of interconnected caves underneath the city. Boys could hide in these secret lairs for weeks or even months at a stretch. Bonnie Stepenoff gives voice to the harrowing experiences of destitute and homeless boys and young men who struggled to grow up, with little or no adult supervision, on streets filled with excitement but also teeming with sharpsters ready to teach these youngsters things they would never learn in school. Well-intentioned efforts of private philanthropists and public officials sometimes went cruelly astray, and sometimes were ineffective, but sometimes had positive effects on young lives. Stepenoff traces the history of several efforts aimed at assisting the city’s homeless boys. She discusses the prison-like St. Louis House of Refuge, where more than 80 percent of the resident children were boys, and Father Dunne's News Boys' Home and Protectorate, which stressed education and training for more than a century after its founding. She charts the growth of Skid Row and details how historical events such as industrialization, economic depression, and wars affected this vulnerable urban population. Most of these boys grew up and lived decent, unheralded lives, but that doesn’t mean that their childhood experiences left them unscathed. Their lives offer a compelling glimpse into old St. Louis while reinforcing the idea that society has an obligation to create cities that will nurture and not endanger the young.




Fun with the Family Michigan


Book Description

Here's the inside scoop on all the family-friendly fun to be had in the Wolverine State—places, events, and treats as varied as the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in Munising, the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in Novi, Mackinac Island's world-famous fudge, and a 600-ton steam locomotive at the Henry Ford Museum.