Showing results for "The Two Americas" in Sports & Outdoors

Inspired by America's beloved national parks, Campfire Stories Volume II is a collection of modern prose, poetry, folklore, and more, featuring commissioned, new, and existing works from a diverse group of writers who share a deep appreciation of the natural world. While the original Campfire Stories captured many historic tales reflecting the first 100 years of the National Park Service, this completely new collection, focused on five different parks (plus two long-distance trails), depicts the parks as we know and experience them today.

Two Years Before the Mast is an 1840 memoir by the author Richard Henry Dana. A Harvard graduate, he spent the years 1834 to 1836 as a sailor on a merchant ship on a voyage from Boston to California. The journey took them past Cape Horn on the Tierra del Fuego archipelago where the Pacific and Atlantic oceans meet. Dana provides detailed descriptions of ship life and the technical aspects of sailing. A chapter on California and its inhabitants offers valuable historical insights on the state which was then a foreign land.

The great unknown of the Southwest is conquered by a one-armed man and his crew of adventurers, placing the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon on the map of the American continent. It is a journey no human being had ever made before. Dangerous rapids, narrow canyon walls offering no escape, terrifying river waterfalls, capsized boats, near drowning, lost equipment and disillusioned men are dramatically described by John Wesley Powell, leader of this adventurous party.

To most of us "mainlanders," the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket are resort destinations, summer homes for the Kennedys, the Obamas, and Patriots coach Bill Belichick. But after the tourists and jetsetters leave, the cold weather descends, and the local shop owners, carpenters, and fishermen ready themselves for the main event: high school football. For over 50 years, the local teams have been locking horns every November. They play for pride, a coveted trophy, and, very often, a shot at the league championship.

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"I saw the whale ahead of us, coming with twice his ordinary speed, and with tenfold fury and vengeance in his aspect. The surf flew in all directions about him and his course toward us was marked by a white foam which he made with continual violent thrashing of his tail; his head was about half out of water and in that way he came upon and again struck the ship." An angry whale rams and destroys a whale ship in 1820.