Local History

This book is based on visitor descriptions of antebellum Mobile, Alabama's physical and social environment. Mobile's foundational era is a period in which the city transformed from a struggling colonial outpost into one of the nation's most significant economic powerhouses, largely owing to the cotton trade and the labor of enslaved people. On the eve of the Civil War, the Mobile ranked as the fourth most populous community in what would soon become the Confederacy, and within the Gulf Coast region, it stood second only to New Orleans in population, wealth, and influence.

Five years after the Civil War, North Carolina Republican state senator John W. Stephens was found murdered inside the Caswell County Courthouse. Stephens fought for the rights of freedpeople, and his killing by the Ku Klux Klan ultimately led to insurrection, Governor William W. Holden's impeachment, and the early unwinding of Reconstruction in North Carolina.

This book tells the story of a time when society was divided and Harvard was becoming what it is today. It is not an exhaustive biography, but it has family information which puts things in perspective, and tells how he and Mather, who were about the same age, lived through the Salem witch trials. Leverett was busy writing logic textbooks in Latin at the time, but didn't dare speak out against the leader of the colony.

This book includes new heartbreaking stories, such as the seven canyoneers in 2015 who all died in a flash flood in Keyhole Canyon, two separate BASE jumping deaths, rock climbing, and flash flood deaths in the Narrows. Zion National Park is home to majestic and wondrous canyons, cliffs, crags, mesas, rivers, and slot canyons. World travelers remain in awe as they drive, walk, hike, and climb into such a unique place that is filled with vibrant, sacred, and mystical energy.

San Francisco today is the poster child for everything that is wrong with America. It’s filthy, narcotics-infested and dangerous. It didn’t used to be this way. In fact, this is the first time that it has been this way. This book reveals exactly how San Francisco has become ruined. It has everything to do with a fundamentally corrupt political machine and underlying philosophy.

A lifetime of moments from the Maine coast to Boston to Capitol Hill. A series of vignettes about saving swimmer's lives, encounters with sharks, John Wayne, cows for tyrants, the FBI/CIA, the KGB, circus clowns, and dental records chicken.

In Blizzards, Banks, and Bakken: An Irreverent History of North Dakota, Jordan Blake Carter takes listeners on a journey across two centuries of stubborn survival. Meet the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara who built thriving river towns long before statehood. March with the populists who took over their own government in the name of fairness. Survive the Dust Bowl, the Depression, and the floods that nearly swallowed cities whole. Then stand in the glow of oil rigs and Friday-night stadium lights, watching a state still learning how to balance change with endurance.

First in flight. Fierce in basketball. Divided by barbecue. And stubborn about everything. North Carolina has never been easy to pin down. It dragged its feet on secession yet sent more soldiers to die for the Confederacy than any other state. It boasts of being “first in freedom” while clinging to old hierarchies. It gave the world pirates, bootleggers, moonshine-fueled stock car races, and barbecue feuds so fierce they could outlast most wars. In this sharp and funny history, Jordan Blake Carter takes you on an irreverent ride through four centuries of contradictions.

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE OCKHAM NZ BOOK AWARD BEST ILLUSTRATED BOOK OF NONFICTION** An illuminating tour through the native sea creatures of Aotearoa, by the bestselling author of The Meaning of Trees Secrets of the Sea is a fascinating introduction to New Zealand's fish and shellfish, weaving...

Most people only consider the Mississippi River when they cross it or when it inconveniently abandons its banks. But every year, millions of tons of cargo are transported by towboats on the river. In Peep Light, Captain Lee Hendrix provides unique insight on people who work and live on and near the Mississippi River. Hendrix, formerly a pilot for the Delta Queen Steamboat Co., has worked on the Mississippi for fifty years. In 2014, Hendrix became captain of the towboat Mississippi with the US Army Corps of Engineers, then he later retired to return to passenger vessels.

In 1976, Di Rushing and her husband, Sam decided to open the first winery in Mississippi. Their business was thriving by 1990, with eight national award-winning wines, a beautiful vineyard, and a successful restaurant. But in March of 1990, a series of unforeseen events rocked the operation. After the Rushings discovered one of the tour guides, Ray Russell, selling drugs in the winery parking lot, they fired him. He responded with a terrorizing vengeance that persisted over the next nine months.

Sweet Home, Strange History: An Irreverent History of Alabama pulls no punches and spares no sacred cows. With sharp humor and plenty of grit, it dives into the contradictions that make Alabama unforgettable: pride and shame, resilience and stubbornness, politics that stumble, and football that redeems it all. From Creek mounds to cotton fields, from George Wallace’s finger wagging to Nick Saban’s trophies, this is Alabama in all its messy glory.

Whiting, Indiana Saturday, August 27, 1955 Sunrise, 6:11 a.m. Its 80 degrees in the shade, and most of the city's residents are still trying to sleep off an airless, oppressive night. But inside the plant at Whiting's biggest employer (and one of the worlds largest oil refineries), something has gone horribly wrong, something that threatens to destroy the entire community. The clock changes. 6:12 a.m. This is the story of what happened at one minute after sunrise on that cataclysmic day in 1955, spoken in the words of the people who lived through it.

Throughout Lewis and Clark for Dummies, you find out about Jefferson's western exploration from his earliest efforts to see the Corps assembled through the aftermath for the explorers, the tribes, and the United States. But the focus of Lewis & Clark for Dummies is on the period between Jefferson's confidential letter to Congress requesting dollars to mount a western exploration (January 18,1803) and the expedition's triumphant (and improbable) return to St. Louis (September 23, 1806): 42 months that changed the world.

For two years, Scots-born John Muir lived in a small cabin along the Yosemite creek, observing the valley's natural beauty and reading Emerson under the stars. The experience forged a lifelong affinity with the site, which would result in its establishment as a national park in 1890. Originally written as a guidebook to the park, The Yosemite describes every aspect of wildlife and landscape that one might encounter there.

Hightower frames his story within the larger history of Old Oklahoma, beginning in Indian Territory, where displaced tribes and freedmen, wealthy cattlemen, and prospective homesteaders became embroiled in disputes over public land and federal government policies. Hightower captures the drama of the Boomer incursions and the Run of ’89, as well as the nascent urbanization of the townsite that would become Oklahoma City. All of these events played out in a political vacuum until Congress officially created Oklahoma Territory in the Organic Act of May 1890.

The City of Angels has played a distinct role in the hearts, minds, and imaginations of millions of people, who see it as the ultimate symbol of the American Dream. David Kipen, a cultural historian and avid scholar of Los Angeles, has scoured libraries, archives, and private estates to assemble a kaleidoscopic view of a truly unique city. From the Spanish missionary expeditions in the early 1500s to the Golden Age of Hollywood to the strange new world of social media, this collection is a slice of life in L.A. through the years.

Author William S. Kiser reshapes the history of the Southwest, underlining the role of the military not just in obtaining territory but in retaining it.

In the late 1880s, Pleasant Valley, Arizona, descended into a nightmare of violence, murder, and mayhem. By the time the Pleasant Valley War was over, 18 men were dead, four were wounded, and one was missing, never to be found. Valley of the Guns explores the reasons for the violence that engulfed the settlement, turning neighbors, families, and friends against one another.

Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each.