In 1866, a 30-year-old Mark Twain sailed to Hawaii on assignment for the Sacramento Union. He wasn’t famous yet. Four months later, he came home with 25 dispatches that helped set one of the great American literary careers in motion.

This volume collects those letters in full, with annotations and historical context for modern readers, classrooms, and book groups.

What Twain Saw in Hawaii
Twain arrived in the last years of the Hawaiian monarchy, before annexation and before the sugar industry remade the islands. He wrote about Kilauea, the court of King Kamehameha V, missionary influence on Native Hawaiian life, and the wreck of the clipper ship Hornet, whose survivors he interviewed in a scoop that spread across the country.

The voice is already recognizably Twain: funny, sharp, skeptical, and very sure of its own point of view. These letters led directly to his first lecture tour, Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands, and helped turn a young newspaper writer into a national figure.

​The Expedition of the Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate is a powerful first-person account of one of the most infamous tragedies in American pioneer history, written by Eliza P. Donner Houghton, who was just a young child during the ordeal. The Donner Party set out in 1846 to reach California, lured by promises of a better life and misled by poor guidance. After taking an untested shortcut known as the Hastings Cutoff, they became trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains by early and relentless snowfall.

What followed was a brutal winter marked by extreme hunger, freezing temperatures, and desperate decisions, including the controversial act of cannibalism. Through this memoir, Eliza recounts the suffering and heroism of those months, not only drawing on her own childhood memories but also incorporating stories passed down from other survivors and documents of the time.

More than a historical record, the book humanizes the people involved—especially her own family—and seeks to correct misconceptions about the event. Eliza writes with compassion and dignity, offering an insider’s view that is deeply moving, informative, and historically significant. Her narrative preserves the memory of the lost while honoring the endurance of those who lived.

​Step into one of the most haunting chapters of America’s Westward migration through the voices of those who lived it. This powerful collection brings together the eyewitness memories of Virginia Reed Murphy and the thorough investigation of C.F. McGlashan, offering a unique dual perspective on the Donner Party’s journey into the Sierra Nevada.

Originally published decades apart, these two narratives illuminate the hopes, hardships, and enduring consequences of a faithful expedition. Enhanced with additional materials for classroom use and historical study, this edition invites readers to rediscover a story of endurance, sacrifice, and the untamed American frontier as we approach its 180th commemoration.