19th century

The first serious study of traditional American perennial gardens, which attained great popularity in the years between the Civil War and World War I, this abundantly illustrated volume explores this old-fashioned garden style--frequently referred to as "grandmother's garden"--as seen in small towns, artists' colonies and craft villages, mining towns, and settlements on the Western frontier.

The guide that enables you to identify, and place in their historic and architectural contexts, the houses you see in your neighborhood or in your travels across America. 17th century to the present.

The narrative of the author's journey from Boston around the Cape Horn and landing at a port in the western coast of the United States. A classic work of non-fiction that inspired Melville.

Attractive drawings and interesting explanatory notes on 91 ships, from “a Danish cog of the 13th century” to a Scottish tea merchant of 1869. Plates 56 and 57 feature a fluyt, the same type as the Godspeed. Fluyts were popular merchant vessels from roughly 1595 to 1670. Historic sources for the illustrations are noted.

Volume 1 of the classic account of life among Plains Indians; ceremonies, hunt, warfare, and more.

Beginning his career as a spy for the East India Company, Burton (1821-1890) visited the "forbidden" cities of Medina and Mecca disguised as an Arab, made a yet more perilous trip to the secret city of Harar in Somalia, discovered Lake Tanganyika in his search for the Nile's source, and had sundry adventures in West Africa, the New World and the Levant. One of the great Arabists of his time, a master of 29 languages, he translated a mass of Oriental literature, mystical and erotic. Upon his death, his wife, in a spasm of piety-cum-prudery, burned his heavily annotated translation of The Perfumed Garden and much else. Explorer, swordsman, linguist, scholar, writer, lover of women and pursuer of hidden knowledge, Burton was par excellence the Victorian version of Renaissance man. (Publishers’ Weekly)

The Northern Neck runs from Falmouth in Stafford County all the way down to Windmill Point in Lancaster County, bounded by the Rappahannock River to the south and the Potomac River to the north.  Now it’s a sleepy section of Virginia but it was once called the Athens of the New World.