In seeking to understand how visitors’ perceptions and experiences have shaped their understanding of the purpose of national parks, and nature more broadly, The Mountains Are Calling places visitors at the center of Yosemite’s story. In histories of the national parks, environmental historians traditionally focus on either a conflict between preservation or exploitation, or a celebration of its founders, but such approaches often overlook the millions of visitors or depict them as backdrops in a larger morality play over the preservation of nature.

Civil War historian Brian K. Burton provides a clear, concise narrative of the battles and offers a stop-by-stop guide through Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. Illustrated with numerous maps and filled with stories of the people and tactics of both battles, this indispensable guidebook will direct battlefield visitors and armchair historians through the events of these pivotal campaigns.

The Missouri River is one of the most dangerous rivers in the United States—and one of the most economically important. In an attempt to better understand the river and its place in the American imagination, Lisa G. Dill set out with four of her mother’s cousins on a forty-year-old pontoon boat on a modern voyage of discovery. 

Both a memoir in travel essays and an anti-guidebook, Bad Tourist takes us across four continents to fifteen countries, showing us what not to do when traveling. A woman learning to claim her own desires and adventures, Suzanne Roberts encounters lightning and landslides, sharks and piranha-infested waters, a nightclub drugging, burning bodies, and brief affairs as she searches for the love of her life and finally herself. 

In the summer of 2023, one of the hottest on record, B.J. Hollars and his nine-year-old daughter Ellie embarked on a two-thousand-mile road trip to complete the Montana Dinosaur Trail, a fourteen-stop trail consisting of museums, state parks, and dinosaur dig sites throughout a state known for its Mesozoic-era fossil record. Charming, thought-provoking, and full of discovery, Dinosaur Dreams is a time-traveling adventure that reminds us of what truly matters: the bonds we forge, the world we inherit, and the future we fight to protect.

Jessica Cherry and Frank Soos’s diverse group of stories covers cycling both past and present. From riders commuting in every kind of weather to those seeking long-distance adventure in the most remote sections of the United States, these stories will inspire cyclists to ride into their own stories in Alaska and beyond.

It was an age without GPS and the Internet, without high-tech monitoring and instantaneous reporting. And it was a time when women simply didn’t do such things. None of this deterred Sharon Sites Adams. In June 1965 Adams made history as the first woman to sail solo from the mainland United States to Hawaii. Pacific Lady recounts the inward journey that paralleled her sailing feats, as Adams drew on every scrap of courage and navigational skill she could muster to overcome the seasickness, exhaustion, and loneliness that marked her harrowing crossings.

While working as an English teacher and freelance journalist in South Korea for twelve years, James Card explored remote mountain valleys with a fly rod. In one of the most densely populated countries in the world, he discovered pristine streams holding rare native trout. Only a few hours from Seoul, Card spent years fly-fishing these streams completely alone.

When people think about space travel, they usually look skyward. But much of spaceflight history happened down here on Earth. Space Age Adventures presents more than one hundred terrestrial sites across the United States related to space exploration, where enthusiasts can have their own space age adventures.
 

In Search of the Golden West offers splendid old-time photographs and descriptions of nabobs, hucksters, naturalists, dudes, realtors, and motorists—all those who sought the reality and created the myth of the Golden West.