They run the alphabet from Abigail Adams' "Remember the ladies" to James Wilson's "We the people" -- and they have inspired Americans since the republic's founding.

Paul Aron, a senior editor and writer for Colonial Williamsburg, has collected a number of such quotations in the eminently readable We Hold These Truths . . . And Other Words That Made America (224 pages, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, $18.95).

Aron gives context and background for each quotation, and his selections run a large gamut. Many, as might be expected, come from Virginians, including Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Marshall, George Mason and George Washington.

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He's perhaps best known as Venus Flytrap on the late, lamented "WKRP in Cincinnati" and has gone on to work as a director and producer. But Norfolk native Tim Reid, who with wife Daphne Maxwell Reid co-founded New Millennium Studios in Petersburg, got his start doing stand-up comedy.

And in the 1960s, he did so in an unusual way, by partnering with white comic Tom Dreesen.

The two tell their story, assisted by Ron Rapoport, in Tim & Tom: An American Comedy in Black and White (254 pages, University of Chicago Press, $24). In this dual biography, the authors share their upbringings and tell how, for five years in the turbulent'60s, they addressed the decade's issues and tried to incite laughter, not violence.

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Even in its heyday, the Clinchfield Railroad, which ran from Elkhorn City, Ky., through Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina to Spartanburg, S.C., was not well-known nationally. But its mountainous route has fascinated railroad fans for years, and they'll be equally intrigued by Jerry Taylor and Ray Poteat's The CSX Clinchfield Route in the 21st Century (184 pages, Indiana University Press, $39.95).

Packed with a wealth of history and lovely color photos, including many from Southwest Virginia, this is a coffee-table book that will spend far more time between a rail fan's hands than lying on the table.

-- Jay Strafford