Packed With Historic Pictures
920980
This is my favorite book on the history of McKinney. It is packed cover to cover with old pictures of the downtown square, some founding fathers (but not too many to be boring) and memorable events in McKinney's history.  The book fits easily in my purse and I have taken it to neighborhood parties where everyone loves to look through the pictures and talk about shops they remember and when this or that happened.  My favorite part of the book is the part that focuses on downtown.  The captions are generally pretty good about telling you which streets you are looking at. For instance, the buildings that are on the corner of Louisiana and Tennessee Streets are not as old as the others.  There are pictures of their predecessors in this book that will just amaze residents.  We've torn down so many buildings but luckily this book provides a visual record of some of them.  I love to see the pictures of the old owners putting up signs back in the 50's and men in fedoras standing around in the shops that were around throughout downtown's history.  There are pictures of the destruction left by a tornado that came through town in 1948 and the elephants that caused the ordinance prohibiting them from ever coming downtown again.

Excellent book for McKinney residents, architecturally-minded folks and people who just like history. Pretty much all of the narrative is provided through captions to the pictures.
600958
Great book!  Loaded with tons of pictures.  Highly recommended.
4510375
This book was purchased as a gift for my train buff husband.  It is full of beautiful photos and history of turn of the century railroads.  A delightful addition to our library of Images of Rail books.
1728533
excellent tome complete with photographs of the history of my hometown.
3208760
This is a good history book with lots of beautiful photos . You may need a magnifying glass to read some of it .
4495607
This is a big heavy book filled with exquisit color photos. There are also a few photos in black and white. The pictures are clear and vivid and in my opinion are suitable for framing right out of the book. Many will end up framed on my wall. If you love beautiful photos with limited text, this is the book for you. There are over 400 pages of cars.
4039148
If you have an interest in the topic and/or you're a fan of Danny Lyon's photography, you'll want to own this book.  Mr. Lyon was present for one of the most historic and serious eras in our nation's history, and the photos are terrific.  The book also includes some very interesting and informative reminiscences by Mr. Lyon and others.
803383
What a lovely book to just LOOK at! Seeing so many of these images brought back so many memories - I am grateful to the author who took the time to forever record places so fondly remembered.... Excellent!
4966562
Great book full of wonderful pictures and great historic information.  My daughter can spend hours exploring the book time and time again.
3177857
120 pages of beautiful color photography on sturdy matte paper, 12 doubled-column pages of the history of Florida, in an oversized hardback.  Coffee table quality. The history is entertaining and informative, scattered with stories of local legends. The pictures are annotated and tell a story in themselves. The book was printed in 1984 and all the pictures appear to be from that time period. I thouroughly enjoyed both looking at the photos and reading the concise history of each of the areas of Florida.
3988137
This is a great history in pictures of Hetch Hetchy and the events that led to its' construction.  Especially timely  because San Francisco is soon to be voting on whether to raze the dam and restore the Hetch Hetchy valley to its' former beauty.  I'm always impressed by this series and the wonderful photographs it finds to fill the pages.
4513493
This is a well done photo book of the subject for those who have folled show over its long history.
2855803
Not only are these photos terrific from a technical sense - and the b&w makes them even more potent - but they also provide a superb look back at a certain era in this city.  On a personal note, most of them were taken during my first several years in NYC and therefore the nostalgia is powerful - but anyone who loves cities and appreciates a huge variety of candid photos will surely love this book.

**For those of you in metro NYC**:  There will be a book launch on October 19 from 7-9 p.m., at the powerHouse in Brooklyn (RSVPs are mandatory).
2450512
Son-in-law loved this book about his hometown.  The old pictures really contributed to the topics covered and there was so much new information. A real keeper.
3141399
The Siege of Petersburg lasted for over nine months so the troops on both sides had too much time on their hands.  Their officers obviously had to not only keep them supplied and trained, but also had to put them to work building fortifications, digging tunnels under the enemy positions, and more.  This book contains a couple of hundred wonderful pictures of the men and their units as well as some of the amazing temporary structures they built.

Look at the little village of gothic style log structures all made from local timber on pages 96 and 97.  And I can't believe you won't be amazed at the neo-gothic church made from the same materials on 98 and 99.  The other wooden structures in the pages following are not something I had previously associated with fighting the Civil War.

Also, look at the uniforms of the various Pennsylvania companies on pages 60-62.  Have you ever seen those uniforms (particularly the hats) in a Civil War movie?  I haven't.  Very different than anything I had seen before.

The post fighting photos of battlefield fortifications, dead soldiers (usually posed) and the shelled town are all fascinating stuff.  I also enjoyed the photos taken in the years and decades after the battle of what people did to commemorate this important part of the war.  The photo are all reprinted in very high quality and large format so you can really study them, even with a magnifying glass to see some amazing detail.

The accompanying text is very informative, helpful in explaining the pictures without every getting in the way.  The information balance is perfectly done.

Very much recommended.
1991900
Someone has done a beautiful job selecting the two hundred or so photos in this book.  From my experience historical photo surveys often fall down because they frequently use far too many technically bad photos that do have someting to say about what they show.  The nice thing about these pages is that you'll not find anything that'll make you say: Why was that picture included?"

Though it was published in 2000 I can't see that this dates the book at all.  USPS might come across as a bureaucratic Washington monster but there is no getting round the fact that it delivers huge amounts of mail anywhere and daily.

The wonderful photos through the pages reveal the history of the mail service and one of the strengths of the book is the frequent naming of individuals in the photos.  Page sixty-seven shows Carrie Hurley, a mailbag machinist who retired in 1923, she had sewn 48 million bag seems over twenty-six years, page 112 shows mail carrier Adolphe Lampe with his horse Daisy and wagon, after January 1955 motorized transport took over mail his deliveries in street of Philadelphia.  Page 134 has a lovely photo of Moses Walter outside the Stella, Kentucky post office (ZIP 41469) where he worked for five decades and traveled over 500,000 miles delivering mail to Appalachian residents.

Mixed in with the individuals are historical photos of how the Service has moved with the times by using technology to handle ever larger amounts of mail.  A photo from 1922 shows the Gehring Mail Distribution Machine used to sort mail but it wasn't until the fifties that non-manual sorting really took off.

The book is a treat to look at with large photos, obviously most are mono and they all get captions that are worth reading.  Two spreads in the back pages feature sixty-seven stamps that use the mail service for the illustrations.  I thought this was a lovely book that puts a human face on a service that tends to be taken for granted.

***SEE WHAT THE INSIDE LOOKS LIKE by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.
4613033
The photography is wonderful.  Even though dated at this time (2016) the information has good historic information and is narrated very well.