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Gregory Thomas Woolford Martin has composed for small and large ensembles, electronica, choir, film, theater, dance and orchestra. He has received grants from Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, and the Eugene and Agnes Meyer Foundation, and scored numerous plays in the DC metro area, credited as Gregg Martin. His compositons for Shakespeare radio adaptations have been broadcast on WAMU, and he both composed and wrote the libretto for his opera Life in Death performed at the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage and at the Capital Fringe Festival. As a musicologist his writings are on the subjects of music technology and aesthetics. He is married to the writer Pamela Woolford Martin and has two children, Tara and Riley.

There is no question about the fascinating tales that come with celebrated violins, as in this volume, and the enormous prices. In 2011, a 1721 Stradivari was sold for nearly ten million pounds. Yet the storied value of old violins has been challenged by the view that it is great violinists rather than violins that give us superior notes. Jascha Heifetz, an esteemed violinist, was accosted by a critic after a performance and praised for the tone his violin had. In response, Heifez held the violin up to his ear and remarked, "I don't hear anything." There will always be those who remain convinced that old violins were varnished with a secret formula or that the wood was subject to a now lost process. Others will say that the millions bid for an old violin are for a sound no better than that of a good modern instrument. Is this a case of beauty being in the eye of the beholder? Still, Sherlock Holmes always plays a Stradivari!

Eugene Floyd DuBois (1882-1959) studied medicine at Columbia after doing his undergraduate work at Harvard and graduating in 1903. At Harvard he was business editor of the Harvard Lampoon, the humor magazine, and rowed. He had a lifelong avocational interest in music but as professor of medicine at Cornell was the author of many important research papers and was medical director of the Russell Sage Institute, an active member of the National Academy of Sciences, and received some of the highest honors that American medicine could confer, including the Kober and Banting Medals. He received the Navy Cross in World War I for dangerous undersea work and maintained a longtime connection with the Navy and in submarine medicine. The collection he gathered as a young student preserves the enthusiasm of another era. Tom Lehrer later made fun of such Harvard songs with his lyrics for "Fight Fiercely, Harvard" Fight fiercely, Harvard, Fight, fight, fight! Demonstrate to them our skill. Albeit they possess the might, Nonetheless we have the will. How we shall celebrate our victory, We shall invite the whole team up for tea (how jolly!) Hurl that spheroid down the field, and Fight, fight, fight!

Hans Rudolf Berndorff (1895-1963) was born in Düsseldorf, Germany. From a young age was a journalist with an interest in the bizarre and adventurous, including shipwrecks and piracy. During the Nazi era he published a number of popular novels that steered away from controversy and avoided political repercussions. He used both his own his own name as well as writing as Rudolf van Wehrt and Hans Rudolf. Joseph Goebbels liked his adventurous tales and thought they contributed to public entertainment and thus helped the war effort. This did not damage his career after the war; he continued his writing without any break and was used by the British in rebuilding the German press services. He had also written movie scripts during the Nazi era but because of its wartime origins, the most famous of them, Shiva and the Gallows Flower, was only released in 1993. Espionage! was his first book. Hanne Hieber, in the Journal of Intelligence History, describes the work as the most influential fiction text in its subject area, praising its originality: "Besides the usual (male and female) suspects like Alfred Redl, Edith Cavell and Mata Hari, he had two chapters on Mademoiselle Docteur, 'the greatest German spy.'" She adds, "In 1936, G.W. Pabst made a movie with two different casts in France and Britain. The French version was not shown before the end of the German occupation. The British version was distributed to the United States in the early 1940s." The full story of Berndorff's ability to remain untouched by a war that destroyed so many writers has never been fully told.

The reader with a curiosity about the secrets of Freemasonry is confronted with a vast and eccentric literature, much of which is highly fanciful and often completely fictional. Finding books that have their feet on the ground, so to speak, is not easy. This is one, solid and truthful, and a good starting place for the curious who wonder about the world's most celebrated discrete society.

The protagonists in Horatio Alger stories are often, if one may play on a metaphor, up a creek without a paddle. In this celebrated Alger novel, the young hero is comfortably ensconced at the Essex Classical Institute until misfortune makes his expensive education impossible. If the problem of financing an education resonates, it is because millions of Americans are frustrated in their ambitions because they now find that the price of education has soared far beyond their capacity to pay, with no prospect of an Alger quirk of fate to help.

'It takes one to know one' is true of avid readers, and certainly of bibliophiles who are acquainted with Percy Fitzgerald, a man who enjoyed writing about old books as much as he did reading them. His observations and prejudices about his favorites will inevitably start a conversation with those who agree or disagree with him, as he reaches out from the page to grab the hand of fellow browsers to sit and talk for a while.

The collecting of autographs of American presidents is done with a passion that is not found about similar figures in other countries. Canadian prime ministers or Finnish presidents are not the focus of hobbyists. The enthusiasm of getting a set of presidential signatures is something of a comment on the energetic American historical emphasis on the country's chief executives. Even in George Washington's time there were forgers who allegedly would produce a Washington letter for a drink at a tavern, so the authenticity of Presidents is a subject marked by intrigue and misadventure. Paul C. Richards' scarce volume is a useful guide to a subject marked by increasingly high prices in the auction rooms. He was a great benefactor of Boston University, where his Robert Frost and Theodore Roosevelt collections are a permanent testimony to his relentless searching of attics and garrets and shrewd purchases.

William Atherton DuPuy was a well-known naturalist who wrote anecdotally and personally about nature in ANIMAL FRIENDS AND FOES, INSECT FRIENDS AND FOES, THE NATION'S FORESTS, and PLANT FRIENDS AND FOES. In another vein he authored GREEN KINGDOM, his account of the life of a forest ranger, and controversially produced HAWAII AND ITS RACE PROBLEM. He also wrote for Harper's and had a connection with the Department of the Interior and, less happily, with the military's chemical warfare projects.

Hendrik Willem van Loon was a Dutch-American professor, journalist, prolific writer, and illustrator. His most famous work, "The Story of Mankind" earned him the prestigious John Newbery Medal, extended by the American Library Association for distinguished contributions to American literature for children. "How to Look at Pictures: a Short History of Painting" was originally published in 1938 as part of the wider efforts of the National Committee for Art Appreciation, formed at the encouragement of Eleanor Roosevelt and other nationally prominent people, to support the arts and boost the public's spirit after the depression years. The book remains a classic attempt to promote and integrate the arts as part of the everyday life in American society.

Horatio Alger created youthful heroes whose persistence and pluck triumphed over enormous odds, often having to educate themselves by a flickering candle and late at night. Readers could identify with the challenges of self-education in a society where only a few had advantages. Mark Mason is one of the most appealing of the Alger success stories, a classic of Americana.

Peter Ditchfield (1854-1930) was a graduate of Oriel College, Oxford, and sometime Inspector of Schools
for Diocese Of Oxford. He was Rector of Barkham from 1886 until his death. A leading Freemason, he was Grand Chaplain of the Grand Lodge of England as well as of the Mark Grand Lodge. He was a passionate historian of old England and wrote about English sporting customs, cathedrals, ancient guilds, village folk traditions, and in this volume about the byways of London. The destruction of parts of the old city during World War II makes this a valuable source of architectural history.

Contrary to what people think about Masonic secrecy, over the centuries a number of books have revealed much about what goes on in lodges. Certainly Jeremy Cross was relied on as a crib for nervous officers when they put on degrees, and his readers were not just the curious, but the Freemasons themselves who wanted to improve their ritual work. Important as a source for Masonic activity in the mid nineteenth century, this volume makes a scarce title available to scholars.

The young Horatio Alger heroes often sold newspapers or delivered telegrams, a reminder of how technology has moved on. But they hoped for better things and in the Alger novels their diligence and hard work won the day and they ended up getting the educations they deserved and the success that their exemplary morality earned. The reader will find this prototypical Alger story both a good read and food for thought in an era when the technology has indeed moved on but the challenges have remained.

Long before Earl Warren was a famous governor of California and then an important Chief Justice of the United States, he was forging a career in Freemasonry. Starting as an officer and eventually master of a local lodge whose history is recounted in this volume, he worked his way up the stairs of the Masonic hierarchy to become Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of California.

There is a lot more to the life of President James Garfield than being shot. He was an educator, clergyman, and congressman who carried on those duties with considerable distinction, as well as being a mathematician who discovered, after everyone else for thousands of years had not, an alternative Euclidean proof. While he is honored at Williams College, where his son Harry was longtime president, and as a huge statue on the grounds of the United States capitol, he deserves more attention and this new edition of a useful biography may encourage that.

The papers of Hans Paul Caemmerer (1922-1954) are deposited in the National Archives and include considerable correspondence concerning this book about Pierre Charles L'Enfant (1754-1825). It was Caemmerer who dispelled the belief that L'Enfant was an engineer, and found that he studied in the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture under his own father, an accomplished oil painter. L'Enfant's big opportunity was to fill a blank canvas, physically and ideologically, of what became the capital. L'Enfant and pace, Caemmerer's life of him, have been much cited by those who have caught a fever in terms of Washington as being of occult design. The need or desire to connect L'Enfant's original drawings for the city with Freemasonry relies on some still poorly researched history. Masonic meetings possibly took place in early Georgetown. Potomac Lodge in Georgetown has the enigmatic Bladensburg Bible that was published in Edinburgh in 1754. Stories recorded long afterwards claimed the book was used for pre Revolutionary Masonic rituals. Since Freemasonry teaches that one reason for belonging is to enable travel in foreign lands, Freemasons befriending each other in earliest Georgetown is a pleasant, but unsubstantiated conjecture.

Albert Pike was a Harvard dropout, Confederate general, lawyer for Native American causes, celebrated Masonic leader, and lifelong writer of poems. Erudite in many languages and expert on folklore and mythology, his work "Morals and Dogma" continues to be a major text in the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. Despite his insistence that he was not the author, the much-reprinted poem "The Old Canoe" continues to be attributed to him and figures in this volume of his verses.

Sir Alfred Rawlinson, the son of a famous Orientalist and envoy to Persia, was himself a pioneer aviator, celebrated sportsman, and important British intelligence officer. As a colonel in the British intelligence corps, he played a significant role in the Middle East. His capture, imprisonment, and unhappy deprivations at the hands of the Turks was in its time a celebrated incident. Since the concept of Orientalism was popularized by Edward Said, the notion that views of the Muslim world were colored and slanted by Western prejudices has revised attitudes of the British imperial cadre that were such an influence on the region. Lawrence of Arabia and his contemporaries have been much more closely scrutinized than they were by earlier generations of scholars. So Sir Alfred's book can be read both as an eyewitness account of a highly formative era and for his attitudes so candidly expressed in this still exciting book.

Few military units attract the attention of Hollywood and novelists as does the Foreign Legion. Those old enough will remember Buster Crabbe as Captain Gallant in the 1950s television serial about the swashbuckling Legionnaires. The non-fictional reality is rather more stark and gritty, and perhaps this volume is much closer to the truth, -- even if Gary Cooper and Victor Mature (who both starred in Legion film potboilers) had a better time of it.

There has been a great lack in international scholarship concerned with ritual and secrecy because so much of the good work is being done in languages that the mono-lingual English-speaking world has no idea exist. The strength of the articles in this collection will come as a considerable surprise even to experts in the field, because the research in Europe is very advanced and frankly is of such high quality that those who are not linguists should look to their laurels. Much is being done in discovering un-mined material in archives and the selections for this volume are a feast of new bibliographical references.

The anti-Masonic movement during the 1820s and 1830s is sometimes related by scholars to the development of the American party system. Certainly individuals migrated to the Know Nothing and Whig movements and eventually to the incipient Republican party, but more research is needed. No state was more influenced by anti-Masonry than Vermont, where many of the lodges closed their doors because of the hysteria about Masonic influence. So this scarce volume is welcome background to a puzzling period in political history.

Wilmer M. Ely introduced whole generations of American youth to the adventures of the Chums and produced this classic story of Florida in the days of rum runners. The young heroes have their boat stolen from them, and without any money they sign on with a commercial fisherman to pursue catch along the coast of Florida. Not everyone they meet is a sportsman, to put it mildly, and they confront some pretty rough criminals who are out to make as much trouble as possible. The boys acquire staunch allies in honest fisherman who help them beat back the crooks, but not without close calls and high adventure. This new edition is introduced by Robert Rich Jr., a well-known authority on Florida fishing and its long history.

Alvin Fay Harlow wrote on many historical subjects, including mailing services, waybills, the telegraph, stamp collecting and education. Born in Sedalia, Missouri, he attended Franklin College in Indiana and then worked in the coal and timber business, and as a commercial artist, before being able to earn a living as a writer. He wrote for Weird Tales, Complete Detective Novel Magazine, All Story Weekly, and other now little remembered periodicals. In addition, he also wrote for Collier's, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Times. Harlow was awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters by Franklin College. This new edition is dedicated to Frank McCluskey, scholar and historian who combines philosophy with wit.

The Victor Book of Opera carries on the proud tradition of operatic synopsis compendiums with a rich array of historic photos and recording references. With its intricate descriptions of opera synopses spanning the length and breadth of the repertoire, The Victor Book of the Opera is a valuable reference for both operatic cognoscenti, and those just beginning to explore this historic art form. Matthew Brewer studied music and operatic performance at Oberlin Conservatory. He currently lives in Washington, DC, where he is an MA candidate at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

The Ku Klux Klan has had several manifestations in the United States. The first emergence was in the 1860s during the Reconstruction Era. Julia Johnsen's work intersects with the second major resurgence of the Klan during the 1920s. The work takes a unique approach, as the Ku Klux Klan is largely reviled by all, and receiving any unbiased reports of the organization are hard to come by. However, such information is helpful in understanding the motivations of its members. As such, Johnsen's work, in laying out both sides of the debate on the Ku Klux Klan makes this an excellent resource. Julia Emily Johnsen authored authoritative works on atomic weaponry, unemployment, social insurance, national defense and the relationship between China and Japan. She produced handbooks to be used by college debaters as well as many articles on national defense policy and international affairs. This new edition is dedicated to Emma Norman, who edits and writes with equal authority.

Seventy-Five Years in California spans the 19th century, offering William Heath Davis' view of California's Pastoral Period. He gives readers a unique look at the disintegration of missions, the rise of the rancheros, the American Invasion, the Gold Rush and the adoption of the territory as a state. Davis himself had an interesting personal history, having been born in Hawaii in 1822, raised in Boston, traveled a great deal by sea, and became one of the most prominent merchants in San Francisco by 1845. The California Gold Rush really was a bonanza. Between 1849 and 1855 the miners gathered more than $400 million dollars; once adjusted, it is a sum today reaching into the trillions. It was a social phenomenon marked by the carnivalesque. In his work Roughing It (1872) Mark Twain's protagonist remarks as his brother heads West, "Pretty soon he would be hundreds and hundreds of miles away on the great plains and deserts, and among the mountains of the Far West, and would see buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs, an antelopes, and have all kinds of adventures, and may be get hanged or scalped, and have ever such a fine time, and write home and tell us all about it, and be a hero...And by and by he would become very rich, and return home by sea, and be able to talk as calmly about San Francisco and ocean, and 'the isthmus' as if it was nothing of any consequence to have seen those marvels face to face." Go they did to the Land of Golden Dreams, in the largest internal migration in American history, and the adventures and tragedies have created a large and memorable literature.

This work is written for non-Historians, and is a handy easy-to-read condensed look at Early American History. It is composed of short chapters each of which is designed to be a stand-alone treatment of a segment of time. It is my hope that this book will help fill the void that is exposed by the general lack of historical perspective which I believe is a major contributor to America's current lack of self-awareness of and appreciation for the uniqueness which is the United States. Dr. Robert Owens is a College Professor/Administrator and the author of a widely published weekly opinion column, The History of the Future, which can be viewed at DrRobertOwens.com. He is also a retired house painter, a retired pastor, a musician and a composer. He holds an Associate Degree in Biblical Studies, Bachelor Degrees in History and Religious Education, a Master's Degree in Religious Education, a Master's Degree in History, and a Ph.D. in Organizational Leadership. Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, Religion and Leadership. His books include: The Constitution Failed, The Azusa Street Revival, America Won the Vietnam War! and NEVER FORGET!

The Electromagnetic Pulse Special Interest Group (EMP SIG) addresses any high-impact threat that could cause long-term nationwide collapse of critical infrastructure. These threats include EMP, extreme space weather, cyber attacks, coordinated physical attacks or widespread pandemics. The EMP SIG provides trusted communications and information for InfraGard members active in any critical infrastructure in any community to enhance planning, mitigation, and sustainable infrastructure. The EMP SIG attracts leading subject matter experts who have agreed to join advisory panels and make themselves available for local InfraGard chapters that may need their special guidance. The ultimate goal of the national EMP SIG is to assist local communities to enhance their own sustainability with a special emphasis on developing local infrastructure capacity from areas as diverse as local power generation and storage to local food production. InfraGard's EMP SIG plans to continue its role in fostering public/private cooperation in a comprehensive "all-of-nation" approach to disaster mitigation and planning. InfraGard members may join the EMP SIG on the InfraGard secure website. To join InfraGard and have access to the secure site, apply on the homepage of www.InfraGard.org. The first time that a broad range of military and civilian government agencies and their private sector counterparts led contingency plans for nationwide collapse of critical infrastructure that could last for more than a month was in October 2011 when the National Defense University, the US Congressional EMP Caucus, InfraGard National's EMP SIG and Maryland's Emergency Management Agency co-hosted a series of workshops and exercises covering these scenarios focusing on geomagnetic disturbances. Since then, the InfraGard National EMP SIG led sessions each year at the Dupont Summit. The sessions covered high-impact threats to critical infrastructure with a special emphasis on geomagnetic disturbance (GMD), and the contingency planning workshops and exercises with the National Defense University and the Maryland Emergency Management Agency. This conference included analysis from NOAA of the July 23, 2012 super solar storm near miss, and research on these impacts on power grids presented at a by-invitation-only session the day before by a number or organizations led by Idaho National Laboratory. For upcoming events and more information see the EMP SIG section of the National InfraGard secure website or contact the EMP SIG Chair, Chuck Manto, at cmanto@stop-EMP.com.

William Andrew Chatto (1799-1864) initially was employed in the wholesale tea business. However, his real passion was antiquarian scholarship, so in 1834, he gave up the family firm and devoted himself to writing full-time. His first work was entitled, Recollections of Fly-Fishing in Northumberland, under the pseudonym, Stephen Oliver. He was interested in many subjects, and his varied publications reflect his diverse pursuits, including wood carving, fishing, tobacco and playing cards. In addition to authoring books, he was the editor for New Sporting Magazine, and Puck, a Journalette of Fun. He was elected an honorary member of the Antiquarian Society of Newcastle-on-Tyne in 1839. He was among the first to suggest that playing cards might have originated in China at the court of Seun-Ho in 1120. This new edition of his work is dedicated to Yasha Beresiner, past Master of the Worshipful Company of Playing Card Makers in London.