Glorious Fourth of July and Other Stories from the Plains by Catherine Gibson & Mary Sprague 

Living through everyday childhood exploits with a large spark of imagination, a young girl grows up on the American plains. Catherine survives a cyclone and a small pox epidemic. Her youth is filled with new sights as her world expands to the Montana frontier and the metropolis of Saint Paul, Minnesota. As the storyteller, Catherine gives insight into a bygone era with child-like enthusiasm and a reflective nature brought on by the passing years. In recounting these episodes from Catherine's childhood, her daughter Mary Gibson Sprague shares a narrative common to many plains families that migrated throughout the U.S. at the beginning of the twentieth century. The tales take on new life as they are paired with paintings created by Catherine in her adult years. These "memory paintings," as she named them, call readers back to a time when birthday parties were new celebrations and children relied on their own ingenuity to occupy themselves.

Hardcover: 71 pages

ISBN-10:‎ 978194181317

Reading age‏:‎ 8 - 11 years

About the author: Catherine Rademacher Gibson was born in Austin, Minnesota, the second child of Francis Aloysius Rademacher and Minnie Cotter Rademacher. She grew up with her brothers Clyde and Raymond in Watertown, South Dakota, and in 1923 her family moved to Minneapolis. She graduated with an art degree from the University of Minnesota in 1929 and taught art in the Detroit Public Schools until her marriage to Captain Verne Cyril Gibson, an engineer for the United States Lighthouse Service. After the birth of Patricia Jean Gibson and Mary Karen Gibson, Verne and Catherine relocated to Marblehead, Massachusetts, where catherine began painting watercolors as the family continued to move around the country, finally settling in San Francisco. Catherine created her "memory paintings" series as a way to tell her childhood stories and cheer up her husband during the last years of his life. 

Image description: The cover features a dark background with a watercolored illustration. There are fireworks in the dark sky and five silhouettes of people playing with sparklers. The title, subtitle, and author's name are printed at the bottom of the cover.