Local History

When Americans turn on their laptops, play video games, go to church, vote, eat TexMex, shop for groceries, listen to music, grill steaks, or watch football, they are, knowingly or not, paying tribute to Texas. Tracing the profound and surprising story of the Lone Star State, Benjamin Heber Johnson shines new light on why Texas has had such a powerful influence on United States history.

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.

William Neal, who called himself "Wild Bill Cody," was seductive and skillful at separating love-struck women from their money, and ultimately, their lives. Apprehended by police, Neal, who proclaimed himself “better than Ted Bundy,” pleaded guilty to three murders then insisted on representing himself at his death penalty trial. But the psychopathic killer found himself up against the incredible courage of his one surviving victim.

Dear Traveler, Welcome to the WanderStories™ History of Shanghai as told by the best local guide. Welcome to Shanghai, the largest city proper in both China and the world. It is one of the major financial centers for Asia and home to one of the world’s busiest ports. Its history goes back for thousands of years, though it is perhaps not until the last thousand or so that Shanghai has been of any significance except to its inhabitants. For centuries a major administrative, shipping, and trading town, Shanghai grew in importance in the 19th century due to European recognition of its ...

Kill the Indian, Save the Man. That is the goal of the Dawes Commission, a federal agency. The Commission is charged with destroying the Muscogee-Creek Nation by allotting communally owned tribal lands to individual members. Forced assimilation is the zeitgeist of 1920s Oklahoma. SAM DAVIS is a handsome, roguish, half-breed. He brokers real estate between illiterate Creeks and land-hungry palefaces. Assimilation makes for good business. Oil strikes bring thousands of fortune-seeking whites to Tulsa. Sam's commissions soar against cascading reports of missing and murdered Creeks. When Sam is...

There are at least thirteen other Scarboroughs in the world, but the Scarborough on Yorkshire's coast in England is the first and parent of all the others. This is a new account of a 2000-year old history of a place that has been Iron-Age camp, Roman signal station, Vikings' lair, Angevin castle, European fish fair, shipbuilding port and Britain's earliiest watering resort that invented the holiday by the sea. Jack Binns was born in Keighley in the West Riding of Yorkshire and educated at the grammar school there and at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. After more than 30 years teaching, as...

Notable shipwrecks of Lake Michigan throughout a century of enterprise, industry, heroism, and disaster on the Great Lakes The Great Lakes are graveyards of a vast number of shipwrecks (30,000 by some estimates), and Lake Michigan has more than the other four lakes combined. The stories of those wrecks tell the history of that mighty lake in its endless, mercurial challenge to human endeavor.

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.

The storm gathers as we sleep. Despite vast amounts of blood and treasure expended since 9-11-2001, America and her allies are losing the war against Islamist violent extremists. For the first time since the War on Terror began, Green Beret Scott Mann, an original architect and implementer of this strategic program, reveals an immediately useful strategic framework to defeat ISIS, al-Qa'ida, and even criminal elements here at home.

History, location, and culture continue to link New Orleans to France while distancing it culturally and symbolically from the US. This audiobook explores the traces of French language, history, and artistic expression that have been present there over the last 300 years. This volume focuses on the French, Spanish, and American colonial periods to understand the imprint that French sociocultural dynamic left on the Crescent City.

Only an extraordinary Texas Ranger could have cleaned up bandit-plagued Southwest Texas, between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, in the years following the Civil War. Thousands of raiders on horseback, some of them Anglo-Americans, regularly crossed the river from Mexico to pillage, murder, and rape. In desperation, the governor of Texas called on an extraordinary man, Captain Leander M. McNelly, to take command of a Ranger company and stop these border bandits. One of McNelly's recruits for this task was George Durham, a Georgia farmboy.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was perhaps the most dramatic and dangerous period of the Cold War. What's less well known is that the city of Miami, mere miles away, was a pivotal, though less well known, part of Cold War history. With its population of Communist exiles from Cuba, its strategic value for military operations, and its lax business laws, Miami was an ideal environment for espionage. Covert City tells the history of how the entire city of Miami was constructed in the image of the US-Cuba rivalry.

In Downtown, Hamill leads us on an unforgettable journey through the city he loves, from the island's southern tip to 42nd Street, combining a moving memoir of his days and nights in New York with a passionate history of its most enduring places and people.

The name Marston Moor has resonated down the centuries since that July day in 1644 when the armies of the Parliament and the Scots inflicted a terrible defeat upon the King's forces commanded by Prince Rupert. It was the battle that destroyed the Royalist north, and in which the cavalry general Oliver Cromwell came to national attention and his tactical genius was first revealed. In 1981 P.R. Newman published an account of the battle which looked at terrain and the evidence on the ground as well as the documents. Accepted as the standard authority for twenty years, many of its conclusions ...

John Wesley Powell’s first descent of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1869 counts among the most dramatic chapters in American exploration history. When the Canyon spit out the surviving members of the expedition - starving, battered, and nearly naked - they had accomplished what others thought impossible and finished the exploration of continental America that Lewis and Clark had begun almost 70 years before.

Wyoming attorney John W. Davis retells the story of the West's most notorious range war. Having delved more deeply than previous writers into land and census records, newspapers, and trial transcripts, Davis has produced an all-new interpretation. He looks at the conflict from the perspective of Johnson County residents - those whose home territory was invaded and many of whom the invaders targeted for murder - and finds that, contrary to the received explanation, these people were not thieves and rustlers but legitimate citizens.

Hoping to discover a more personal take on Santa Fe? I created Santa Fe: A Local’s Enchanting Journey Through the City Different to give you an insider’s view of everything the city has to offer. Drawing on years of living here, I’ve put together an inviting New Mexico guidebook full of lesser-known stops, local eateries, and experiences you won’t see in other resources.

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.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott, which ignited the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, has always been vitally important in American history. This is the autobiographical account of the creation of the boycott by one of its principal organizers. With the publication of this book, the boycott becomes a milestone in the history of American women as well.

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