Showing titles in State & Local

On October 8, 1862, Union and Confederate forces clashed near Perryville, Kentucky, in what would be the largest battle ever fought on Kentucky soil. The climax of a campaign that began two months before in Northern Mississippi, Perryville came to be recognized as the high water mark of the western Confederacy. Some said the hard-fought battle, forever remembered by participants for its sheer savagery and for their commanders' confusion, was the worst battle of the war, losing the last chance to bring the Commonwealth into the Confederacy.

Author Kurt C. Schlichting tells the story of the Manhattan waterfront as a struggle between public and private control of New York's priceless asset. Nature provided New York with a sheltered harbor but presented the city with a challenge: to find the necessary capital to build and expand the maritime infrastructure. From colonial times until after the Civil War, the city ceded control of the waterfront to private interests, excluding the public entirely and sparking a battle between shipping companies, the railroads, and ferries for access to the waterfront.

Situated in a barren desert landscape, Las Vegas exists for one reason—water. Popular as a waystation for travelers, the Las Vegas Valley attracted the attention of railroad visionaries at the end of the 19th century. After purchasing land from a local widow, the developers laid out a town in 1905. Vegas hasn’t slowed down since.

In Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom, Christopher S. Wren overturns the myth of Ethan Allen as a legendary hero of the American Revolution and a patriotic son of Vermont and offers a different portrait of Allen and his Green Mountain Boys. Based on original archival research, this is a groundbreaking account of an important and little-known front of the Revolutionary War, of George Washington (and his good sense), and of a major American myth.  

Eve L. Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures - they're an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together. Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings. 

Few cities are so dramatically identified with their environment as San Francisco—the landscape of hills, the expansive bay, the engulfing fog, and even the deadly fault line shifting below. Yet most residents think of the city itself as separate from the natural environment on which it depends. In Our Better Nature, Philip J. Dreyfus recounts the history of San Francisco from Indian village to world-class metropolis, focusing on the interactions between the city and the land and on the generations of people who have transformed them both.

An old farmer boasts that he has used the same ax his whole life -- he's only had to replace the handle three times and the head twice. In an eclectic, insightful meditation on the powerful impulse to preserve and restore, Howard Mansfield explores the myriad ways in which we attempt to reconnect with and recover the past -- to use the same ax twice.

In 1973, the small southwest Nebraska railroad town of McCook became the unlikely scene of a grisly murder. More than 40years later, author James W. Hewitt returns to the scene and unearths new details about what happened.

Tales from the Indiana Hoosier Locker Room covers over a century of Indiana University basketball. Current and former Hoosiers talk of the excitement, the disappointment, and the celebration that has turned IU basketball into a statewide religion. The history of the Indiana program is revealed through the memories of the school’s hundreds of lettermen. Without a doubt, this is a must-read for every March Madness and college basketball fan.

On the first of September 1785, with night coming on and the weather deteriorating, the crew of the ship Faithful Steward sailed toward Delaware's notorious False Cape. In the summer of 1785, a group of Irish migrants took to the Atlantic to escape the abuse and persecution of the ruling classes at home. They sought a new life in the United States, a place "where the banner of freedom waved proudly" and "every good was possessed."

Transporting listeners back to a dramatic time in the late 1800s, Dobrow spotlights a trio of men who reshaped our image of the West and earned national fame: John M. Burke of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, Tody Hamilton of the Barnum & Bailey Circus, and Moses P. Handy of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Drawing on scores of original source materials, Dobrow brings to light the surprisingly sophisticated techniques of these Gilded Age press agents.

If you think the wildest, wackiest stories that Carl Hiaasen can tell have all made it into his hilarious, bestselling novels, think again. Dance of the Reptiles collects the best of Hiaasen’s Miami Herald columns, which lay bare the stories—large and small—that demonstrate anew that truth is far stranger than fiction.

On April 12, 1861, Confederate troops began firing on Fort Sumter, beginning the bloodiest conflict in American history. Since that time numerous historians have described the attack in many well-regarded books, yet the event still remains overlooked at times in the minds of the public. The Cannons Roar seeks to remedy that. Rather than providing a third-person, after-the-fact description, acclaimed author Bruce Chadwick will tell the story of the attack from the people who were in the thick of it.

The Mound Builder Myth is the first book to chronicle the attempt to recast the Native American burial mounds as the work of a lost white race of “true” native Americans. Thomas Jefferson’s pioneering archaeology concluded that the earthen mounds were the work of Native Americans. In the 1894 report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Cyrus Thomas concurred, drawing on two decades of research. But in the century in between, the lie took hold, with presidents Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Abraham Lincoln adding their approval.

Are you interested in the history of one of the most isolated kingdoms on Earth? Then this audiobook is for you! When most people hear the phrase “ancient Hawaii”, it brings up a certain air of mystery and intrigue. Some might think of tattooed tribesmen sailing across the vast emptiness of the Pacific Ocean under the moonlight, dancing around campfires to connect with their gods, or living on the sides of volcanos. But is this an accurate depiction? Or is there more to the early people of Hawaii?

When Mark Twain was growing up, all he wanted to be was a steamboat man. And so Twain ran away in pursuit of his dream. Life on the mighty river for Twain consisted of paddleboats and history, poker games and gamblers, larger-than-life characters and outlandish festivals like Mardi Gras. Twain recorded it all with his keen eye for detail and biting wit.

J. G. Boswell was the biggest farmer in America. He built a secret empire while thumbing his nose at nature, politicians, labor unions, and every journalist who ever tried to lift the veil on the ultimate "factory in the fields". The King of California is the previously untold account of how a Georgia slave-owning family migrated to California in the early 1920s, drained one of America 's biggest lakes in an act of incredible hubris and carved out the richest cotton empire in the world.

> The Paradox of Jamestown discusses the circumstances surrounding English colonization of Virginia and the evolution of slavery in that colony. Beginning with an examination of 16th- and 17th-century life in England, the authors explain many of the reasons - social, political, religious, and economic - people chose to leave the Old World for a new life in the Americas. They describe the early interactions between the settlers and the Indians, the difficulties those groups had in establishing cooperative relationships, and the many difficulties the settlers had in adjusting to life in the New World.

Once upon a time. Happily ever after. Such are the classic promises of fairy tales. Yet in Texas we find a twist to the familiar storyline. In If the Devil Had a Wife, there is still the battle of Good vs. Evil, a beautiful maiden, a wealthy suitor, a kingdom of riches and the wicked witch, but any similarity with Cinderella and Snow White ends there. With the help of her life partner and an attorney (always necessary in these modern times), Nelda Stark executes a devious plan that elevates fraud and theft to a new high.

This new South End Press edition makes available the full text of this out-of-print classic - along with a new foreword by Manning Marable, interviews with participants in DRUM, and reflections on political developments over the past three decades by Georgakas and Surkin.