Meet the Mexicans with all their diversity of races, beliefs, humor, warmth, and talents. The Pre-Columbian cultures that left behind depictions of their everyday lives in murals, temples, writings and carvings. The conquest opened up the new lands to European settlers and established a new race of native and whites. Paintings, drawings and murals tell the story of the Mexican people.
The history of Mexico as told through the carvings, pyramids, murals, paintings, and photographs of the past. From pre-Columbian times to the beginning of the twenty first century. The Spanish Colonial world that led to the nineteenth century revolution for Independence. The twentieth century turmoil both internal and external brings us to today’s questions to be solved.
The book tells the story of the years leading up to the voyage that Christopher Columbus made in 1492. The life of Columbus from boy, young seaman, and visionary is told with the backgrounds of the ancient streets, docks, and ships, in the seaport of Barcelona, Spain.
For Jean François Lelange and Pierre André, the summer of 1744 is one they will long remember. As Jean waits for his uncle’s merchant ships to return with much-needed supplies, Pierre worries that his father, a fishing proprietor, has no food to give his hungry fishermen. Has France really gone to war against the British, as rumored?
El Rancho de Las Golondrinas is a settlement that served as a fort and an inn on the Camino Real during the seventeenth century in what is now Santa Fe, New Mexico. Interpreters dress and act the part of the early colonists. We see the families work the fields, the visiting monks who sustain the faith of the settlers.
Joshua Carpenter and his family have been traveling for over a month now, heading west to Illinois, or possibly even Iowa. With all their possessions in a crowded Conestoga wagon, they cover mile after mile of the dusty, government-built trail called the National Road. Food is often scarce, and sometimes the water in their barrel reaches frighteningly low levels. But courage, and dreams of affordable land and a better life, spur them on.
It is July 4, 1836, and Prairietown, Indiana, is celebrating the biggest and most exuberant holiday of the year. This is the “Glorious Fourth”, and in Prairietown–and across the country–townfolk and strangers passing through have stopped their day-to-day lives to join together as Americans to commemorate their young nation’s birthday.
About 1800, Americans moving westward settled in the hills and hollers of “northwestern Virginny,” an area in what we now call Appalachia. In those days before supermarkets, factories, and cars, work was endless, and all family members–children as well as their grandparents–were important for survival.
The Curtis family has recently moved to Prairietown from a thriving village in New York State. The four Curtis children, especially Thomas, are determined that Christmas will be just as wonderful as it was back east. But how can it be? So many ingredients of the family’s traditional Christmas customs are missing on the frontier.