Local History

1968 was an unprecedented year in terms of upheaval on numerous scales: political, military, economic, social, cultural. In the United States, perhaps no one was more undone by the events of 1968 than President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Kyle Longley leads his listeners on a behind-the-scenes tour of what Johnson characterized as the 'year of a continuous nightmare'. Longley explores how LBJ perceived the most significant events of 1968, including the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and the violent Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Almost 7,000 fans eagerly packed into the Ringling Brothers big top on July 6, 1944. With a single careless act, an afternoon at the "Greatest Show on Earth" quickly became one of terror and tragedy as the paraffin-coated circus tent caught fire. Panicked crowds rushed for the few exits, but in minutes, the tent collapsed on those still struggling to escape below. A total of 168 lives were lost, many of them children, with many more injured and forever scarred by the events.

Western outlaws terrorized the country during the late 1800s and early 1900s, robbing stagecoaches, banks, trains, and merchants. While they were fearsome, some became folk heroes and legends.

Dan Manning has put together a compilation of stories about his ancestors and himself as each of them have interacted with anything equine. He is nearly as hybridized as the mules he writes about from his great, great grandfathers...one was a Belgian anarchist, one was a Kentucky abolitionist, and one was a missionary in the Indian Nation, to his great grandfathers...one was a teamster who became a hardware-man, and one was a circuit-riding preacher in Missouri.

Organizers, activists, artists and community members share their struggles in New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina. Floodlines is a firsthand account of community, culture, and resistance in New Orleans. The book weaves the stories of gay rappers, Mardi Gras Indians, Arab and Latino immigrants, public housing residents, and grassroots activists. From post-Katrina evacuee camps to torture testimony at Angola Prison to organizing with the family members of the Jena Six, Floodlines tells the stories behind the headlines from an unforgettable time and place in history.

The naturalist, author, and advocate for preservation, John Muir (1838-1914) was also known as "John of the Mountains" and "Father of the National Parks". In the spring of 1869, John Muir was looking for ways to fund his explorations of California’s Central Valley region, when a ranch owner offered him a job herding sheep in the Sierra Nevada. In The Yosemite, Muir chronicled his experiences of the beautiful wilderness in appealingly descriptive prose. The audiobook is a treasure trove of portrayals of the shifting phases of the year in Yosemite.

The Green Hornet Streetcar Disaster tells the riveting tale of this calamity. Combing through newspaper accounts as well as the Chicago Transit Authority’s official archives, Craig Cleve vividly brings to life this horrific catastrophe. Going beyond the historical record, he tracks down individuals who were present on that fateful day on State and 62nd: eyewitnesses, journalists, and even survivors whose lives were forever changed by the accident.

The past 60 years have shaped and reshaped the group of French-speaking Louisiana people known as the Cajuns. During this period they have become much like other Americans and yet have remained strikingly distinct. The Cajuns: Americanization of a People explores these six decades and analyzes the forces that had an impact on Louisiana's Acadiana.

According to the Elliot Ness myth, which has been widely disseminated through books, television shows, and movies, Ness and the Untouchables defeated Al Capone by marshaling superior firepower. In Scarface Al and the Crime Crusaders, Dennis Hoffman presents a fresh new perspective on the downfall of Al Capone.

In the fall of 1969, Gary Bray landed in South Vietnam as a recently married, freshly minted second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. His assignment was not enviable: leading the platoon whose former members had committed the My Lai massacre--the murder of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians--18 months earlier. In this compelling memoir, he shares his experiences of Vietnam in the direct wake of that terrible event.

In telling the story of five generations of her family and its farm in the Arkansas Delta, Margaret Jones Bolsterli brings together her own research, historical perspective, and family lore as it reaches her from the days of her great-grandfather down to her nephew. The result is a family saga that is at once universal and personal, historical, and timeless.

John Dix was born with an adventure-seeking spirit. Within a year after of his father's death, he shipped out at the age of 16 on a privateer during the War of 1812. That led to him joining the South Pacific merchant trade, and becoming captain of his own ship. When it was accidentally wrecked in New Zealand, he returned to America, married a girl from Gloucester, Massachusetts, and Dixboro in Michigan Territory, and never went to sea again.

In the popular imagination the picture of slavery, frozen in time, is one of huge cotton plantations and opulent mansions. However, in over a hundred years of history detailed in this book, the hard reality of slavery in Mississippi's antebellum world is strikingly different from the one of popular myth. It shows that Mississippi's past was never frozen, but always fluid. It shows too that slavery took a number of shapes before its form in the late antebellum mold became crystalized for popular culture.

Insulting the president is an American tradition. From Washington to Trump, presidents have been called "lazy," "feeble," "pusillanimous," and more. Our leaders have been derided as "ignoramuses," "idiots," "morons," and "fatheads," and have been compared to all manner of animals - worms and whales and hyenas, sad jellyfish, strutting crows, lap dogs, reptiles, and monkeys. Political insults tell us what we value in our leaders by showing how we devalue them. In Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels, linguist Edwin Battistella collects over 500 insults aimed at American presidents.

What began as the obscure local case of two Italian immigrant anarchists accused of robbery and murder flared into an unprecedented political and legal scandal as the perception grew that their conviction was a judicial travesty and their execution a political murder. This book is the first to reveal the full national and international scope of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, uncovering how and why the two men became the center of a global cause célèbre that shook public opinion and transformed America’s relationship with the world.

Responding to reports of gold discoveries on the Fraser River, thousands of prospectors from California and other points on the Pacific coast crossed the 49th parallel to British territory in 1858. Most returned to San Francisco and Puget Sound later in the same year, blaming their failure to find wealth in the river canyons on uncooperative Hudson's Bay Company officials and the English government.

Border Bandits is an account of the many, many stories of back-and-forth skirmishes between the Mexicans and Texans during the late 1800s and early 1900s. There practically wasn't a border, which caused a lot of problems and thievery between the two countries. These 17 tales in this book re-create border raids that originated from both sides of the fluid and much contested line and tells the stories of colorful characters - Mexican and American - that have since secured their place in history.

From the marriage equality debate to the COVID-19 lockdown, ‘free speech’ has become the new battleground in Australian society. What does the furore over one footballer’s social media postings reveal about how it got that way? For a period in 2019, a tweet from rugby player Israel Folau...

Oregon isn’t tidy. It’s moody, messy, and gloriously contradictory. This is the state that bans Styrofoam but worships chainsaws, that rails against Californians while happily selling them real estate, and that brags about recycling while secretly hoarding sticky six-packs in the garage. In this sharp, funny, and unapologetically honest history, Oregon struts onto the stage as the Pacific Northwest’s moody teenager — rebellious, misunderstood, and always dramatic.

For decades, history has considered Tammany Hall, New York's famous political machine, shorthand for the worst of urban politics: graft, crime, and patronage personified by notoriously corrupt characters. Infamous crooks like William "Boss" Tweed dominate traditional histories of Tammany, distorting our understanding of a critical chapter of American political history. In Machine Made, historian and New York City journalist Terry Golway convincingly dismantles these stereotypes.