Ruby Sisson Library

A British historian who is not a Freemason debunks myths about Freemasonry being a threat to civilization as he traces this secret brotherhood's origins in Medieval building guilds, role in the French and American Revolutions, scandals, anti-Mason sentiment, spread worldwide, and modern presence in Britain and the US.

In 1861, Colorado was a newly named territory. Four years later it was forever changed, by the Civil War that had been raging back East and by its own development and the evolution of mining. The Colorado that emerged in the spring of 1865 was no longer the frontier that had found itself in a war. That frontier, that time, that way of life, all had passed. This is the story of Colorado and its people during the years of the Civil War, 1861-1865. It...

This Pulitzer Prize-winning history of World War II chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese empire, from the invasion of Manchuria and China to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Told from the Japanese perspective, The Rising Sun is, in the author's words, "a factual saga of people caught up in the flood of the most overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened--muddled, ennobling, disgraceful, frustrating, full of paradox."...

We live in a time of tremendous religious awareness, when both believers and non-believers are deeply engaged by questions of religion and tradition. This ambitious book ranges back to the origins of the Hebrew Bible and covers the world, following the three main strands of the Christian faith, to teach modern readers how Jesus' message spread and how the New Testament was formed. We follow the Christian story to all corners of the globe, filling...

Tells the dramatic history of Byzantium from its beginnings in AD 330 when Constantine the Great moved the imperial capital from Rome to the site of an old Greek port in Asia Minor called Buzantium and renamed it Constantinople, to its rise as the first and most long-lasting Christian empire, to its final heroic days and eventual defeat by the Turks in 1453.

An account of Admiral Richard E. Byrd's 1928 expedition to Antarctica drawn from interviews with surviving members of the expedition and extensive use of their diaries, letters, and unpublished manuscripts, together with material uncovered in Byrd's private papers.

"For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man. My disease has increased in severity and I feel that it will soon cost me an increased amount of money if not my life." So wrote a quiet young Ohioan in 1900, one in an ancient line of men who had wanted to fly, men who wanted it passionately, fecklessly, hopelessly. But now, at the turn of the twentieth century, Wilbur Wright and a scattered handful of other adventurers...

Examines the early years of baseball, discussing such teams as the New York Knickerbockers and the Cincinnati Red Stockings, and investigates the myths and misconceptions about the game.