Arcadia Public Library

Attracted by the myths of town life and the chance of work, people from villages all over Papua New Guinea have come to the towns. Cowboy and Maria in Town tells the story of two such migrants living in the settlements that surround the capital, Port Moresby. Cowboy is a reformed 'rascal'- unemployed and illiterate with a criminal record. He invents an electric guitar out of scrap materials and plays his distinctive rock-and-roll on street corners,...

Resisting his own urge to walk away, the author, an artist, took his sketchbook and made, over the course of a decade, a series of pen-and-ink and watercolor portraits in war zones, refugee camps, and on the move. While he worked, his subjects - migrants and refugees in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and Asia - shared their stories. Theirs are the human stories behind the headlines that tell of fleeing poverty, disaster, and war, and of venturing...

A former cellist moves back to his hometown with his wife and accepts a position preparing corpses for burial.

"In the 60,000 years since people began colonizing the continents, a continuous feature of human civilization has been mobility. History is replete with seismic global events-pandemics and plagues, wars and genocides. Each time, after a great catastrophe, our innate impulse toward physical security compels us to move. The map of humanity isn't settled-not now, not ever. The filled-with-crises 21st century promises to contain the most dangerous and...

At the end of 1853, San Francisco was a city on the move. It had twelve daily newspapers, nine insurance companies, consulates of twenty-seven foreign governments, and six-story buildings where sand dunes once stood. A few years earlier, San Francisco was just a sleepy little town. But the sight of gold in the rushing waters of the American River sent a ripple around the world and set the stage for an event that would forever change a city, a fledgling...

Discusses the conditions of African Americans in the South before, during, and after the Civil War, and the migration of many former slaves, led by such men as Benjamin Singleton and Henry Adams, to the West looking for a better life.

"In the 1870s, a Black family undertakes a perilous wagon journey westward for a tenuous shot at freedom in Nebraska"--