Synopses & Reviews
The city of Denver was born during the great "Pikes Peak or Bust" gold rush of 1859 when flakes of placer gold were found where the South Platte River meets Cherry Creek. With the discovery of more gold, Denver became a boomtown, and African American pioneers began to arrive in search of prosperity and a better future. Initially, Denver's African Americans lived scattered throughout the city and in the Cherry Creek area. By the late 1890s, most had relocated to the Five Points Neighborhood. Many worked in Denver during the week and farmed their homesteads in Dearfield on the weekends. They often spent their holidays at Winks Lodge and summers at Camp Nizhone.
Review
Title: Regional Nonfiction
Author - Sandra Dallas
Publisher: Denver Post
Date: 1/17/10
You see them everywhere: those 9-by-7-inch history books with the sepia-toned photographs on the covers. They chronicle not just cities and towns but also old neighborhoods, natural monuments and local ethnic groups.
These narrowly focused books are part of Arcadia Publishing's Images of America series. More than 5,000 titles have been issued in the past 16 years; 39 of them on Colorado, and another 21 on the state are in progress.
Because the publications are not sold just in bookstores but in a variety of retail outlets, such as floral shops, antiques galleries and grocery stores, "We make local history available to an audience that's not necessarily interested in history," says Devon Weston, Arcadia's publisher for the West. Ace Hardware and Walgreens are major sellers. The booklets each contain from 180 to 240 photographs and 8,000 to 18,000 words of text.
Here's a sample of the books recently published on Colorado:
"University Park and South Denver," by Steve Fisher. The curator of special collections at the University of Denver's Penrose Library tells the history of DU and south Denver.
In the 1890s, a group of farmers headed by Rufus "Potato" Clark gave the fledgling university 150 acres, provided the school plant trees, lay out streets and forbid liquor establishments. The area grew into DU's University Park campus with its hodgepodge of buildings. The book includes photos of DU (and the neighborhood) from the laying of Old Main's Cornerstone to the new light-rail station. One is of student Condoleezza Rice.
"Denver's City Park and Whittier Neighborhoods," by Shawn M. Snow, shows how City Park grew from a racetrack, natural-history museum and monkey island frequented by men in bowler hats and women in long skirts.
The adjacent neighborhood between York and Downing streets is Whittier, built as a middle-class white neighborhood where children played cowboy and rode tricycles, and their fathers took the streetcar to work downtown.
Another neighborhood book is "Denver's Capitol Hill Neighborhood," by Amy Zimmer. Of course, Capitol Hill has been featured in many books, but it was Denver's most extravagant neighborhood and is worth another look. In addition to photographs of the houses, Zimmer has pictures of many of the families who lived there.
"African Americans of Denver," by Ronald J. Stephens, La Wanna M. Larson and the Black American West Museum, chronicles blacks in Denver from former slave Barney Ford, who built the Inter-Ocean hotel downtown, to former mayor Wellington Webb. These are mostly middle- and upper- class African-Americans, from streetcar conductors to Madam C.J. Walker. The authors take note of Five Points' musical tradition with photos of the Rossonian Lounge and performers Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton and others.
Outside of Denver, Barbara Fleming and Malcolm McNeill produced "Fort Collins," illustrated mostly with photographs taken by Mark Miller, beginning in 1910. Other books on Colorado include "American Indians of the Pikes Peak Region," by Celinda R. Kaelin and the Pikes Peak Historical Society, "Dillon and Silverthorne," by Roy Goodliffe, and "Colorado National Monument," by Alan J. Kania.
Arcadia's only competition in this niche field comes from locally produced books, many published by writers themselves on their own dime and sporadically distributed. Arcadia is not a vanity publisher. It doesn't charge writers or require authors to guarantee the sale of a certain number of books. Instead, it pays them a standard royalty, which is about 8 percent of net. However, authors, underwrite their own costs, such as use fees for photographs, but that's standard. The average initial press run of an Arcadia book is about 1,200 copies, and many books, of course, go into subsequent printings.
Weston calls Coloradans "historically minded," and Arcadia has published more books on Colorado than any other mountain state. Its local top seller so far is a book about Telluride, which has sold more than 4,000 copies.
Because of that historical interest, the publisher expects to print more Colorado books and is looking for authors. Arcadia approaches local historical organizations, schools, ethnic groups and so on for recommendations.
Celinda R. Kaelin, author of "American Indians of the Pikes Peak Region," is president of the Pikes Peak Historical Society, for instance, and Roy Goodliffe ("Dillon and Silverthorne") is a college professor who tapped the Denver Water Board for photos. Although half of the authors have done a certain amount of writing, they generally are not established historians or writers. That makes an Images of America book a good way to get started.
Arcadia accepts ideas over the transom, encouraging would-be authors to contact the company's western office in San Francisco (415-543-4405.)
About the Author
Authors Ronald J. Stephens, Ph.D., and La Wanna M. Larson have drawn the images in this collection from the Black American West Museum and from local private collections. Stephens is professor of African and African American Studies at Metropolitan State College of Denver and author of the Arcadia title Idlewild: The Black Eden of Michigan. Larson is executive director and curator of the Black American West Museum, a member of the African American Advisory Committee of the Colorado Historical Society, and a recipient of the prestigious Preserve America Award for Heritage Trails and Tourism.