America Legend

Before Fire Island was a destination for New Yorkers and vacationers, it was so isolated that Captain Kidd the pirate considered it an excellent place to hide treasure - and some say, bodies. Several shipwrecks occurred on the island, creating even more legends of treasure and, of course, the ghosts that protected those treasures. Narrator Scott Nilsen makes these ghost stories and tales of the old Fire Island come alive.

As the Klondike gold rush peaked in spring 1898, adventurers and gamblers rubbed shoulders with town-builders and gold-panners in Skagway, Alaska. The flow of riches lured confidence men, too - among them Jefferson Randolph "Soapy" Smith (1860 - 98), who with an entourage of "bunco-men" conned and robbed the stampeders. Soapy, though, a common enough criminal, would go down in legend as the Robin Hood of Alaska, the "uncrowned king of Skagway", remembered for his charm and generosity, even for calming a lynch mob.

Roy Bean was an American saloon-keeper and Justice of the Peace in Texas, who called himself "The Only Law West of the Pecos". He and his three brothers set out from Kentucky in the mid 1840s, heading into the American frontier to find their fortunes. Their lifetimes of triumphs, tragedies, laurels, and scandals will play out on the battlefields of Mexico, in shady dealings in California city halls, inside eccentric saloon courtrooms of Texas, and along the blood-soaked Santa Fe Trail from Missouri to New Mexico. They will kill men, and murder will likewise stalk them.

Lifelong baseball fanatic and former college ball player Abe Streep had long since grown disillusioned with the slick spectacle of modern major-league baseball when he discovered the Santa Fe Fuego, a scrappy upstart team struggling through its first season in an independent professional league that few baseball fans had even heard of. The Fuego players were paid barely fifty dollars a week.

In Cherokee myth - as in other indigenous American traditions - the whole of creation is alive and able to communicate like humans and with the human beings who share their environment. Cherokee myths explain how the world came to be the way it is and imparts important lessons about Cherokee cultural values.

The Wild West has made legends out of many men, but it has forged a lasting legacy for some of the frontier towns that hosted famous Western icons as well, and aside from Tombstone and Deadwood, no frontier town is better known than Dodge City, Kansas. Legends of the West: Dodge City, Kansas comprehensively covers the history of the city, profiles the people who called it home, and highlights the attractions and events that made it famous.

The Wild West has made legends out of many men and women through the embellishment of their stories, but it was Buffalo Bill Cody who truly brought the Wild West to life. Though he had a long career, Buffalo Bill eventually became synonymous with his world-famous Wild West Show. By depicting stereotypical Western scenes, Buffalo Bill became one of the men most responsible for establishing how the public came to remember the Wild West.

Of all the colorful characters that inhabited the West during the 19th century, the man who has earned an enduring legacy as the region's quirkiest is John Henry "Doc" Holliday (1851-1887), a dentist turned professional gambler who was widely recognized as one of the fastest draws in the West. In fact, the only thing that might have been faster than the deadly gunman's draw was his violent temper, which was easily set off when Holliday was drunk. By the early 1880s, Holliday had been arrested nearly 20 times.

Space may be the final frontier, but no frontier has ever captured the American imagination like the Wild West, which still evokes images of dusty cowboys, outlaws, gunfights, gamblers, and barroom brawls over 100 years after the West was settled. A constant fixture in American pop culture, the 19th-century American West continues to be vividly and colorful portrayed not just as a place but as a state of mind.

A constant fixture in American pop culture, the 19th century American West continues to be vividly and colorfully portrayed not just as a place but as a state of mind. In Charles River Editors' Legends of the West series, listeners can get up to speed on the lives of America's most famous frontier figures in the time it takes to finish a commute, while learning interesting facts long forgotten or never known.

The most famous woman of the Wild West was also possibly the most colorful and mysterious. "Considered a remarkable good shot and a fearless rider for a girl of my age", Calamity Jane claimed to be a veteran of the Indian Wars, a scout, and the wife of Wild Bill Hickok, all on the way to becoming a dime novel heroine.

In Steel Drivin' Man, Scott Reynolds Nelson recounts the true story of the man behind the iconic American hero, telling the poignant tale of a young Virginia convict who died working on one of the most dangerous enterprises of the time: the first rail route through the Appalachian Mountains. Using census data, penitentiary reports, and railroad company reports, Nelson reveals how John Henry, victimized by Virginia's notorious Black Codes, was shipped to the infamous Richmond Penitentiary to become prisoner number 497, and was forced to labor on the mile-long Lewis Tunnel for the C&O railroad.

Insightful, telling, ironic, and moving, 14 Native-American legends reflect a nomadic non-property-owning culture, with a reverence for all things natural.

Winchester, Virginia, is an emblematic American town. As the US economy and American culture have transformed in recent decades, the ground under centuries-old social codes has shifted, throwing old folkways into chaos. Homeplace teases apart the tangle of class, race, and family origin that still defines the town and illuminates questions that now dominate our national conversation - about how we move into the future without pretending our past doesn't exist, about what we salvage, and what we leave behind.

A treasury of imaginative tales including: the Algonquin story of how Glooskap conquered the Great Bull-Frog; "The Meeting of the Wild Animals", a Tsimshian myth; "The Bear Man", a Cherokee legend; and more.

In The Messi Effect, Paul Tenorio, national soccer writer for The Athletic, draws on coveted insider access to bring readers behind the ropes and into the inner sanctum and chronicle the last act of Lionel Messi. The Messi Effect takes you inside the locker room and behind the scenes as...

Las leyendas son relatos que explican algún fenómeno de la naturaleza, pero no lo hacen de manera “científica”. El color de una fl or, el origen de los relámpagos o del trueno, tenían forma de cuento entre los pueblos originarios. Esa historia era relatada amorosamente de padres a hijos, para que los misterios del mundo tuvieran una explicación. Se transmitían en forma oral, de generación en generación.

In his first work of narrative nonfiction, Matthew Pearl, bestselling author of acclaimed novel The Dante Club, explores the little-known true story of the kidnapping of legendary pioneer Daniel Boone’s daughter and the dramatic aftermath that rippled across the nation. On a quiet midsummer...

A deep investigation into historical documents that prove the notorious outlaw Jesse James faked his own death Presents the legend of Jesse James and counters it with the real story, based on family records Provides photographic evidence, a journal of Jesse James’s, and historical...

A lot of ink has been spilled covering the lives of history's most influential figures, but how much of the forest is lost for the trees? In Charles River Editors' American Legends series, listeners can get caught up to speed on the lives of America's most important men and women in the time it takes to finish a commute, while learning interesting facts long forgotten or never known.