Showing results by author "D. A. L." in All Categories

Often everything starts with a simple plan. Yakiesha Simmons had lost her fiancé to corporate spies desperate enough to kill. She could not rest while the next man stepped into her murdered fiancé’s vacancy uniformed and unprepared for the danger that awaited him. It was a simple act of kindness before the arrival of the Christmas holiday. Just let him know his life could be in danger. There are doors that open before our lives. Some remain open and we can pass through them and exit them at the whim of our will. There are other doors that we step through and once having done so, they ...

Discover notable historic moments that has impacted society today. Visit https://swellcast.com/R_D_M_L to add your episodes to this community podcast, or to start your own podcast.

The Ministry has always been part of our world, operating in the moral grey area of radical thought and revolutionary technology. It works to prevent intellectual contagion in an era where a dangerous thought can spread across the globe faster than a pandemic, and more virulently. Jacob Trials is one of their star agents, a man who has carried out actions both heroic and villainous, both necessary and brutal. He has given over his very body to the cause, with machinery that he barely understands adapting and enhancing him. When an unknown group starts hunting him with a viciousness he can ...

Aboard the Steamboat Arabia, Josephine and Jessica Tate head up the Missouri River to meet their father in Parkville, where a mercantile will be built to aid settlers going into the interior. The border between Kansas Territory and Missouri is a smoldering powder keg. It needs only a spark to explode. Pro-slavers, free-staters, abolitionists, jayhawkers and border ruffians vie to decide how the Territory will join the Union—as a slave state or free. In the “Border War” that precedes the Civil War, Kansas earns the name “Bleeding Kansas” for the blood shed between it and Missouri. ...

May 14, 1863, Lou McCoy's life changed forever. That day, Lou's husband, a Rebel recruiter she hadn't seen in weeks, appeared at her door for an unannounced visit. He left with a kiss and a strong, "Don't tell anyone I was here." Later that night five Federal soldiers came to her home and demanded to know where her husband was hiding. She refused to tell and was arrested the next day. She left three children behind. After a week of house arrest in Saint Joseph, Lou signed the Oath of Allegiance to the Union and was released. She did not go home. Instead she stayed to work in the hospital. ...

From the Oregon Trail to the camps of the Lakota Sioux and throughout the Civil War, Ben and Sarah Walters learn to survive. Taken captive by the Sioux after her wagon train is attacked, Sarah learns to live and care again. Through Ben, experience the battles of Wilson's Creek, Lexington and Shiloh, feel the filth and privation of Libby Prison; share a friendship that grows between Sarah and a slave, and live through the destruction of a country torn apart by war. Journey back to one of the most explosive periods in our history in this story of survival, learning, determination, forgiveness...

War is hell, its aftermath just as devastating, as evidenced in western Missouri after the Civil War. Four years of taxes came due, and a new constitution was issued, excluding those who fought on the “wrong” side from voting, teaching, even preaching. Former bushwhacker Buck Jackson wants only to leave his past behind and marry the girl who saved him from himself. With taxes due, the Drake Constitution, and the long-lasting effects of General Orders Numbers 9 and 11, he has few legal choices to save the two families he loves. Nora Miers wants only to live out her childhood dream of ...

To feed her family in the final years of the Civil War, Martha Harrison works at the woolen mill of the Roswell Manufacturing Company. There "Roswell Gray" cloth is made for Confederate Uniforms. Each day Martha prays Sherman, in his vow to "Make Georgia Howl," doesn't go through Roswell on his way to Atlanta. But he does. Four hundred women and their children are arrested at the mill and sent to the Louisville Military Prison hundreds of miles away. There Elizabeth Temms teaches Martha how to survive their living hell--and what real heroes look like.

War is devastating. The Civil War in Cass County was hell on earth. On the shared border between Kansas and Missouri the sayings "brother against brother," "father against son" and "neighbor against neighbor" must have certainly originated here. It was not only spoken--it was lived.From the Border War, which began five years BEFORE the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, to the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, fear was an everyday companion to the people who lived in this rural Missouri county.This is the story of one family who met each new day with the fear of being robbed, beaten ...

The Ghost Dance, a spiritual dance of the Lakota Sioux in the late 1800’s, becomes their hope—and their demise. Their ancestors were to rise from the dead, reclaim their lands and restore it to its natural state, as it was prior to the intrusion of the white man. But what actually happened was far from what Wovoka, their Messiah, preached. Ghost Dancers follows Lt. George Hawkins from the Battle of the Little Bighorn to the newly established Indian reservations to the massacre at Wounded Knee, a massacre precipitated by the Ghost Dance. Follow George on General George Crook’s “...

Half-blood Blue Fox hates the children in his white school. He hates his white parents, too. Thrown into the white world when his dying mother leaves him with Ben and Sarah so he will have a future, Blue must endure those who mock him, while wanting only to return to his native Lakota. As time passes, Blue learns to love his surrogate parents and his surroundings, until a cruel, racist, man drives him from them. Finding his Lakota relatives, he learns acceptance is not easily won—anywhere. When he does prove himself and becomes one of The People, Long Hair Custer, comes to the Little ...

Sam Whitmore and Tom Hansen, childhood friends who fought on opposite sides of the Civil War, reunite fifteen years later with a common goal—to save Sam's home from Northern bankers. Sam recruits Tom to do the only thing he can think of to save it. Find gold! Setting off for the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory, they find more than they bargained for in the form of Mother Nature, Lady Luck, would-be claim jumpers, and thieves. Can Sam and Tom find the gold they’re looking for and make it back in time to save his home? Or will it all be for naught?

All it takes to turn your life upside down is one notification on your phone. Someone knows what you did, what you spent years trying to forget. Now they’re going to make it public. Unless you do exactly what they say. Once you’ve followed their instructions to the letter, you realise this is just the start. Because they’ve led you to a secret that your friend would kill to keep hidden, a story that would ruin them if it ever came out.

The Centaurians is an early sci-fi novel imagining a lost civilization beyond the North Pole, centuries ahead of humanity in technology and society. A fascinating look at pre-modern science fiction and the era’s speculative ideas.

Maggie Douglas was different than other girls her age. From the time she was 13 years old there were no dolls or frilly dresses for her. Instead Maggie could out ride, out rope, and out shoot her two brothers, father and hands on the Lazy D, her family's cattle ranch northwest of Kansas City, Missouri. But besting her brothers and father wasn't enough. As Maggie grew to adulthood she wanted to make a real difference in the expanding country around her. Striking out alone, going from Boston to Cheyenne to Deadwood, Maggie spoke for those who couldn't, or wouldn't, as a voice for the women's ...

Tom Whitmore’s only love was raising and racing horses—until Abby came along. Losing his heart to this filly, as wild and willful as either of his studs, he must tame her or lose himself. Yankee by birth and southern gentleman by residence and trade, Tom understands better than most the political chasm between the north and south long before the War Between the States becomes reality. Following his heart, he enlists in the Northern Cause with the 8th Ohio Volunteers and spends the next three years in a living Hell. Will his love survive? Will he?

Enjoying the life of a college student, Adam Weber didn't think or care much about the Vietnam War. But when his wealthy parents force him to choose between their choices for his life and love, all that changes. Disinherited when he goes against his parents' wishes, he loses his "umbrella" of college, is drafted, and the war in Southeast Asia takes on new meaning. There he learns many valuable lessons about life and death, friendship and survival. Injured at Khe Sanh, he returns home and must learn to forgive the parents he blames for his being sent to Vietnam, while trying to rebuild his ...

The lure of FREEDOM was great! Caleb, freed by Lincoln's Emancipation Proclomation, seeks that freedom. The journey is long and full of danger, including slave catchers, bushwhackers, led by a past enemy who stumbles upon Caleb and is anxious to repay him for past transgressions, and finally, Mother Nature at her worst. In his search Caleb meets Prudy, the woman who would become his wife; Smokey, a small boy who needs a family, and Lula, an aged woman with a wisdom only time and experience can teach who freely imparts that knowledge - whether wanted or not. Caleb's quest for respect is ...

Sam Whitmore hates slavery. Turning his back on his slave-holding family, he purchases a run-down tobacco plantation with the hope of someday making it a success. Freeing Horace and Jefferson, the slaves who came with what he now calls Summerset, they become Sam’s new family... Until the night he meets Ellie Baker and his life changes forever. Ellie believed what Sam believed and upon their marriage, she happily stays in Tennessee to help him make Summerset a success. The first few years Sam’s dreams are realized, but soon after the weather deserts him, leaving a worthless property and ...

Once, humanity lost itself to the machine. Now the era of the Body Butchers is a fading memory and mankind awaits the coming singularity, long predicted and long delayed. The Conception: the birth of a true AI that will lead them to a new era. For Keri, this epoch-making event barely registers. She spends her days like so many others, waiting for her chance to enter the spheres, the online realm where knowledge is instant and the mind a mere gateway to something far greater. The time in between these moments is nothing but time to kill. But when a man dies in her arms she finds herself ...