San Antonio College Library

On a cool June morning, a woman is walking her dog in the idyllic coastal village of Salten along a tidal estuary known as the Reach. Before she can stop him, the dog charges into the water to retrieve what first appears to be a wayward stick, but to her horror, turns out to be something much more sinister. The next morning, three women in and around London -- Fatima, Thea, and Isabel -- receive the text they had always hoped would never come, from...

"To celebrate her forthcoming biography of Constance Fenimore Woolson, Anne Boyd Rioux has selected the best of this classic writer's stories. Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894) was one of the few nineteenth-century women writers considered the equal of her male peers. Harper & Brothers was so enamored of her work that the firm agreed to publish whatever she could write. In this gathering, Rioux has chosen fiction over the course of Woolson's...

Why was the United States the only nation in the world to fight a war to end slavery? Fleming looks at the reasons of why the Civil War was fought, and shows that the polarization that divided the North and South and led to the Civil War began decades earlier than most historians are willing to admit-- back almost to the founding of the nation itself.