Make joy a habit and transform your life! You can train your brain to experience each day with increasingly greater joy! Dive into this one-month plan of simple activities that keeps you creatively engaged and stimulated as you develop a consistently joyful outlook. Research tells us that it takes a month of daily practice to acquire a new habit. These thirty-one mini-adventures are designed to produce a consistent mindset of joy that overflows into everything you do. More than a modern-day self-help solution, this approach has been around for centurieseven millennia. Its what the apostle Paul wrote about in 61 AD amidst a lifestyle of impoverishment, criticism, and hardship. Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things (Philippians 4:8 NASB). Wherever you are in life, whether facing minimal or major obstacles, you can train your brain to experience greater joy and fulfillment. As you start on this adventure, it will be like playing a game throughout your day, creating a secret inner-life that keeps you smiling inwardly, even through mundane tasks. Along the way, youre transforming your mindset and creating new lifelong habits. So onward and upwardinto the light! Features: * Questions for individual, couple, family, or group use. * Leaders guide for eight weeks of group study. * Thirty-one adventure cards for inspiration and note-taking throughout the day.

The companion to the Star wars exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum explores the mythology used as the basis for the Star wars movie trilogy

Aunt Phillis's Cabin; or, Southern Life As It Is by Mary Henderson Eastman is a plantation fiction novel, and is perhaps the most read anti-Tom novel in American literature. It was published by Lippincott, Grambo & Co. of Philadelphia in 1852 as a response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, published earlier that year. The novel sold 20,000-30,000 copies, making it a strong commercial success and bestseller. Based on her growing up in Warrenton, Virginia of an elite planter family, Eastman portrays plantation owners and slaves as mutually respectful, kind, and happy beings. Plot The story is set in unnamed rural town in Virginia, which is frequented by several plantation owners living around it. The town relies on trade from the cotton plantations for its economy. Understanding this, the plantation owners, in contrast to their neighbors in surrounding towns, have adopted a benign approach towards their slaves to keep them peaceful and assure the safety of the town. Several characters in and around the town are introduced throughout the story, demonstrating how this process works and the delicate balance of such a process in action........... Seth Eastman (1808-1875) and his second wife Mary Henderson Eastman (1818 - 24 February 1887) were instrumental in recording Native American life. Eastman was an artist and West Point graduate who served in the US Army, first as a mapmaker and illustrator. He had two tours at Fort Snelling, Minnesota Territory; during the second, extended tour he was commanding officer of the fort. Mary Henderson was born in Warrenton, Virginia in 1818 to a family of the elite planter class. She moved with her family to West Point, New York when her father was assigned as a surgeon at the military academy. There she met and married Seth Eastman in 1835 when she was seventeen and he was twenty-seven. As Henderson noted in her novel Aunt Phillis's Cabin (1852), she was a descendant of the First Families of Virginia and had grown up in slaveholding society. In 1841 Captain Eastman was appointed commander of Fort Snelling. He and his family lived there for years. This was when Henderson Eastman wrote Dacotah, or Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling (1849), which Seth Eastman illustrated. She used her time at Fort Snelling to record and preserve the local culture. Among the legends she allegedly collected from the Dakota was a version of the death of the lovelorn Chief's daughter, "Princess Winona." However, at that time in history, "Winona" which means first born was not in use as a proper name, and the Dakota do not use European titles of royalty. She sent her book to the US Congress in 1849; it is online on Project Gutenberg. After the Eastmans returned to the East, they lived in Washington, D.C. In the years of tension before the American Civil War, many writers published novels that dealt with each side of the slavery issue. After the stir caused by Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery Uncle Tom's Cabin, Mary Henderson Eastman defended southern slaveholding society by writing Aunt Phillis's Cabin: or, Southern Life As It Is (1852). It sold 20,000-30,000 copies, making it a bestseller and one of the best-known of the anti-Tom novels produced in that period.............

The materials for the following pages were gathered during a residence of seven years in the immediate neighborhood—nay—in the very midst of the once powerful but now nearly extinct tribe of Sioux or Dahcotah Indians. Fort Snelling is situated seven miles below the Falls of St. Anthony, at the confluence of the Mississippi—and St. Peter's rivers—built in 1819, and named after the gallant Colonel Snelling, of the army, by whom the work was erected. It is constructed of stone; is one of the strongest Indian forts in the United States; and being placed on a commanding bluff, has somewhat the appearance of an old German castle, or one of the strongholds on the Rhine. The then recent removal of the Winnebagoes was rendered troublesome by the interference of Wabashaw, the Sioux chief, whose village is on the Mississippi, 1800 miles from its mouth. The father of Wabashaw was a noted Indian; and during the past summer, the son has given some indications that he inherits the father's talents and courage. When the Winnebagoes arrived at Wabashaw's prairie, the chief induced them not to continue their journey of removal; offered them land to settle upon near him, and told them it was not really the wish of their Great Father, that they should remove. His bribes and eloquence induced the Winnebagoes to refuse to proceed; although there was a company of volunteer dragoons and infantry with them. This delay occasioning much expense and trouble, the government agents applied for assistance to the command at Fort Snelling. There was but one company there; and the commanding officer, with twenty men and some friendly Sioux, went down to assist the agent. There was an Indian council held on the occasion. The Sioux who went from Fort Snelling promised to speak in favor of the removal. During the council, however, not one of them said a word—for which they afterwards gave a satisfactory reason. Wabashaw; though a young man, had such influence over his band, that his orders invariably received implicit obedience. When the council commenced, Wabashaw had placed a young warrior behind each of the friendly Sioux who he knew would speak in favor of the removal, with orders to shoot down the first one who rose for that purpose. This stratagem may be considered a characteristic specimen of the temper and habits of the Sioux chiefs, whose tribe we bring before the reader in their most conspicuous ceremonies and habits. The Winnebagoes were finally removed, but not until Wabashaw was taken prisoner and carried to Fort Snelling. Wabashaw's pike-bearer was a fine looking warrior, named "Many Lightnings." The village of "Little Crow," another able and influential Sioux chief, is situated twenty miles below the Falls of St. Anthony. He has four wives, all sisters, and the youngest of them almost a child. There are other villages of the tribe, below and above Fort Snelling.

"A picture of Southern life taken at different points of view from the one occupied by the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin. The writer being a native of the South, is familiar with the many varied aspects assumed by domestic servitude in the sunny region, and therefore feels competent to give pictures of Southern Life as it Is. Pledged to no clique or party, and free from the pressure of any and all extraneous influences, she has written her book with a view to its truthfulness; and the public at the North, as well as at the South, will find in Aunt Phillis's Cabin not the distorted picture of an interested painter....It is the truth that all profess to seek, and in a matter of such vital interest to the whole nation as Domestic Slavery. Truth - not highly wrought imaginary representations - is above all things demanded. Such truth in the enticing garb of a skillful fiction will Aunt Phillis's Cabin present. The author does not come before the public as the apologist of Slavery, but with the earnest desire to represent it as it is, and in doing so, she will show its ameliorating features in strong contrast with the painful scenes so elaborately set forth in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin." -The Literary World, Volume 11, July, 1852

This work in verse is attributed to Mary Henderson Eastman and recounts the death of Mary Virgina Wade better known at Jenny Wade, the only civilian death during the Battle of Gettysburg.

A writer on Slavery has no difficulty in tracing back its origin. There is also the advantage of finding it, with its continued history, and the laws given by God to govern his own institution, in the Holy Bible. Neither profane history, tradition, nor philosophical research are required to prove its origin or existence; though they, as all things must, come forward to substantiate the truth of the Scriptures.