Local History

Imperial San Francisco is the epic saga of how all great cities parasitize their hinterlands for the sake of those elites who own and run them by using the mass media at their command to shape the thought of those who unwittingly serve their interests. Using San Francisco as an example of how cities employ remote control technology to exploit water, energy, natural resources, and labor from an expansive imperium, it takes the listener from ancient Rome to the University of California’s role in the creation of nuclear weaponry and its first use.

Prostitution, gambling, and saloons were a vital, if not universally welcome, part of life in frontier boomtowns. In Saloons, Prostitutes, and Temperance in Alaska Territory, Catherine Holder Spude explores the rise and fall of these enterprises in Skagway, Alaska, between the gold rush of 1897 and the enactment of Prohibition in 1918. Her gritty account offers a case study in the clash between working-class men and middle-class women, and in the growth of women’s political and economic power in the West.

Ranald MacDonald, a solitary adventurer, entered secretive Japan in 1848, risking certain imprisonment, if not death, in the closed kingdom. Born at Astoria on the banks of the Columbia River, MacDonald (1824-94) was the son of a high-ranking Chinook woman and a Hudson's Bay Company official. He became fascinated with stories about the little-known Japanese while a youngster at the HBC's Ft. Vancouver and Red River schools.

In einer fiktiven deutschen Stadt, die den bezeichnenden Namen "Roulettenburg" trägt, wartet die Familie eines verschuldeten russischen Generals voller Ungeduld auf eine in Aussicht gestellte reiche Erbschaft. Doch statt des ersehnten Geldes trifft eines Tages die reiche Moskauer Verwandte persönlich ein und verspielt in wenigen Tagen ihr gesamtes Vermögen. In dieser verzweifelten Situation sucht Polina, die Tochter des Generals, Zuflucht bei dem Erzähler Aleksej, dem Hauslehrer der Familie, und gesteht ihm ihre Liebe.

It is hard not to fall in love with fashion plate Mary Christiana Hettler who gives up the high society of Chicago to ultimately move to rural Nevada, one of the bleakest sites in the nation to serve as an Episcopal Deaconess. Upon landing in the mining town, known primarily as a murder capital during int heyday, Mary Christiana doesn't give an inch. She transforms a dusty, dingy "icebox" of a house into one that becomes the heart of the Episcopal community with hot pink rooms, exotic flowers and a rolling, grassy yard.

In Corn, Caucuses, and Catastrophes, Jordan Blake Carter takes listeners on a rollicking ride through Iowa’s past and present. From the Honey War fought over beehives to penny auctions that defied the banks, from floods that drowned cities to butter cows that drew crowds, Iowa has always been equal parts resilient and ridiculous. This is the state that feeds the nation, humiliates presidential candidates at the State Fair, and rebuilds after every disaster with casseroles in hand.

Gottfried Keller wurde 1819 in Zürich geboren. Er starb 1890 ebenfalls in Zürich. "Kleider machen Leute" (1874) ist wohl die bekannteste Novelle Kellers aus dem Zyklus "Die Leute von Seldwyla". Zahlreiche Verfilmungen und Vertonungen hat das Werk erfahren. Keller vereint hier meisterlich komische Gesellschaftskritik mit einer poetischen Liebeshandlung. Als Satiriker nimmt Keller Eigen- und Standesdünkel ebenso aufs Korn wie Gutgläubigkeit und Unterwürfigkeit.

On January 7, 1994, residents of the Berkshire Hills woke up to a typical snowy winter day in the majestic woods of Western Massachusetts. The quaint New England towns, the idyllic scenery and the people who lived there could have stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

Author and journalist Cody McDevitt tells the story of one of the worst civil rights injustices in Western Pennsylvania history. In 1923, in response to the fatal shooting of four policemen, the mayor of Johnstown ordered every African American and Mexican immigrant who had lived in the city for less than seven years to leave. They were given less than a day to move or would face crippling fines or jail time and were forced out at gunpoint.

In April 1938, Swift River Valley residents held a farewell ball to mark the demise of the quintessential New England town of Enfield and its three smaller neighbors, Greenwich, Dana, and Prescott. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts sacrificed these three towns to build the Quabbin, a massive reservoir of drinking water for residents of Boston. Three prominent residents attended the somber occasion.

Our lives are built around businesses that connect far-flung rural places to urban centers and global destinations. This "country capitalism" that proved successful in the US South has made it possible to satisfy our demands at the click of a button, but each click comes with hidden environmental costs.

John Muir (1838-1914) was an influential naturalist, author, environmental philosopher, and advocate for the preservation of wilderness areas in the United States. In 1869, Muir traveled to California and spent a long time in the area that is now the Yosemite National Park. This narrative takes the form of a hiking guide filled with adventure. Muir was a master of description, providing stirring portraits of the area’s wildlife, waterfalls, valleys, meadows, giant sequoias groves, lakes, mountains, and glaciers.

Why is racism still with us, and what can the Civil Rights Movement tell us about today? David Billings, a self-described “son of the South,” tackles these questions in his well-researched, deeply personal and eminent new audio book, Deep Denial: The Persistence of White Supremacy in United States History and Life.

A genteel Border South town not far from the nation’s capital is shaken by a series of vicious slayings at historic sites. These include a Civil War cemetery for escaped slaves; a burial mound of Confederate soldiers; a church associated with George Washington; and a museum on the Antebellum Era. At the same time, violent break-ins take place at venerable banks and townhomes connected with the lives of Washington, Robert E. Lee, and civil rights figures.

How do we draw the lines between "good" and "bad" neighborhoods? How do we know “ghettos”? This book questions the widely held assumption that divisions between urban areas are reflections of varying amounts of crime, deprivation, and other social, cultural, and economic problems. Using Ogden, Utah, as a case study, Pepper Glass argues that urban reputations are “moral frontiers” that uphold and create divides between who is a good and respectable - or a bad and vilified - member of a community.

In Making the Second Ghetto, Arnold Hirsch argues that in the post-depression years Chicago was a "pioneer in developing concepts and devices" for housing segregation. Hirsch shows that the legal framework for the national urban renewal effort was forged in the heat generated by the racial struggles waged on Chicago's South Side.

In late September 1919, black sharecroppers met to protest unfair settlements for their cotton crops from white plantation owners. Local law enforcement broke up the union's meeting, and the next day a thousand white men from the Delta - and troops of the US Army itself - converged on Phillips County, Arkansas, to "put down" the black sharecroppers' "insurrection". Writer and Delta native Grif Stockley considers the evidence and tells the full story of this incident for the first time, concluding that black people were murdered in Elaine by white mobs and federal soldiers.

The revolutionary Ohio Valley is often depicted as a chaotic Hobbesian dystopia, in which Indians and colonists slaughtered each other at every turn. In Unsettling the West, Rob Harper overturns this familiar story. Rather than flailing in a morass, the peoples of the revolutionary Ohio Valley actively and persistently sought to establish a new political order that would affirm their land claims, protect them against attack, and promote trade.

The Appalachian Trail, a thin ribbon of wilderness running through the densely populated eastern United States, offers a refuge from modern society and a place apart from human ideas and institutions. But as environmental historian - and thru-hiker - Sarah Mittlefehldt argues, the trail is also a conduit for community engagement and a model for public-private cooperation and environmental stewardship. In Tangled Roots, Mittlefehldt tells the story of the trail’s creation.

G.C. "Red" Jones' classic memoir of growing up in rural eastern Kentucky during the Depression is a story of courage, persistence, and eventual triumph. His priceless and detailed recollections of hardscrabble farming, of the impact of Prohibition on an individualistic people, of the community-destroying mine wars of "Bloody Harlan", and of the drastic dislocations brought by World War II are essential to understanding this seminal era in Appalachian history.