San Antonio College Library

Articles describe celebrations, feasts, rituals, festivals, fairs, and holidays from around the globe.

Setting more than thirty world's fairs from 1853 to 1984 in their historical context, Robert W. Rydell, John E. Findling, and Kimberly D. Pelle show that the expositions reflected and influenced not only the ideals but also the cultural tensions of their times. Illustrated with archival photographs of fair buildings, exhibits, and souvenirs, Fair America surveys a century and a half of these dazzling, culturally revealing events.

'Greta Pratt returns to the county fairs of her childhood to present a vision of American Midwest communities largely unfamiliar to millions of urban dwellers. In this book she has created a visual anthology of fairgoers and fair participants of all shapes and sizes. For five summers, she traveled the Midwest chronicling the rural life of the region - parades of civic pride, displays of exemplary harvests, and heifers and swine groomed by the Future...

"As darkness falls on the fairgrounds, the animals venture out of the woods for one magical, memorable night! An exhilarating wordless picture book." --

"An accessible, authoritative guide to understanding the "silent spring" of threats in our collective backyard. More than 80,000 new chemicals have been developed and released into the global environment during the last four decades. Today the World Health Organization attributes more than one-third of all childhood deaths to environmental causes, and as rates of childhood disease skyrocket -- autism, asthma, ADHD, obesity, diabetes, and even birth...

"Dr. Stephen Hawking was the most renowned scientist since Einstein, known both for his groundbreaking work in physics and cosmology and for his mischievous sense of humor. He educated millions of readers about the origins of the universe and the nature of black holes, and inspired millions more by defying a terrifying early prognosis of ALS, which originally gave him only two years to live. In later life he could communicate only by using a few facial...