Local History

This audiobook presents a history of Culver, Lake Maxinkuckee, and the Culver Military Academy. Interesting facts and a wealth of other information are found in A History of Culver and the Culver Military Academy. Culver, Indiana, has a rich and varied history as a resort town and the home of the famous Culver Educational Foundation. During more than a year of research, the author read the entire run of The Culver Herald and The Culver Citizen and worked with original sources never before published. Here is Culver and Culver Military Academy in all its grandeur.

When a black man was accused of attacking a white woman in a rural Florida town, a tinderbox of racial hatred was ignited. On New Year's Day 1923, Rosewood, a town of hard-working, middle-class African Americans, was burned to the ground by an angry mob of whites. After hiding in frigid nearby swamps for days, the few survivors never returned.

The origins of gentrification date back to World War I - only it was sometimes known as “remodeling” then. Dennis Gale’s insightful book The Misunderstood History of Gentrification provides a recontextualization of American gentrification, planning, and policymaking. He argues that gentrification must be understood as an urban phenomenon with historical roots in the very early 20th century.

In 1893, the 27.5 million visitors to the Chicago World’s Fair feasted their eyes on the impressive architecture of the White City, lit at night by thousands of electric lights. In addition to marveling at the revolutionary exhibits, most visitors discovered something else: beyond the fair’s 633 acres lay a modern metropolis that rivaled the world’s greatest cities. The Columbian Exposition marked Chicago’s arrival on the world stage, but even without the splendor of the fair, 1893 would still have been Chicago’s greatest year.

The year was 1965. The Beatles, Elvis Presley, and The Righteous Brothers filled the airwaves. Television shows like The Adventures of Ozzy and Harriett and The Andy Griffith Show mirrored the innocence of life in the dusty city of Tucson, AZ. But the sun-baked desert surrounding Tucson was hiding a sinister secret. A psychopath names Charles Schmid, later nicknamed the "Pied Piper of Tucson" by Life magazine, would steal that innocence away, along with the lives of three beautiful teenage girls.

What happened in Kirven, Texas, in May 1922, has been forgotten by the outside world. It was a coworker's whispered words, "Kirven is where they burned the [Negroes]", that set Monte Akers to work at discovering the true story behind a young white woman's brutal murder and the burning alive of three black men who were almost certainly innocent of it. This was followed by a month-long reign of terror as white men killed blacks while local authorities concealed the real identity of the white probable murderers and allowed them to go free.

Black Snake is the story of four leaders - LaDonna Allard, Jasilyn Charger, Lisa DeVille, and Kandi White - and their fight against the pipeline. It is the story of a new generation of environmental activists, galvanized at Standing Rock, becoming the protectors of America's natural resources.

Kiawah Island: A History, by historian Ashton Cobb, provides a comprehensive consideration of the diverse factors and factions that have combined to shape Kiawah's fascinating history. Cobb calls upon a wide array of sources to tell the story of a South Carolina sea island that has been the site of great change through the centuries, but has remained a treasured location for generations of inhabitants and devoted visitors.

The years from 1935 to 1960 changed Alaska forever. World War II brought Japanese bombs and soldiers to the Aleutians, big defense dollars to build a road to the Lower 48, and Russian pilots to fly secret missions out of Fairbanks. The Cold War era saw more folks stream into Alaska. And along with them came a proliferation of TB, a civil rights battle for the Native people, and a struggle to win statehood.

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to The Maritime History of Massachusetts and learn about 18th and 19th century Massachusetts history.

In 1823, Tennessee historian John Haywood encapsulated a foundational sentiment among the white citizenry of Tennessee when he wrote of a "long continued course of aggression and sufferings" between whites and Native Americans. According to F. Evan Nooe, "aggression" and "sufferings" are broad categories that can be used to represent the framework of factors contributing to the coalescence of the white South.

Long Island's history is filled with fascinating firsts, magnificent mansions, and captivating characters. From Glenn Curtiss, the first pilot to fly a plane on the island, to Earle Ovington, who carried the country's first airmail, the area has been known as the cradle of aviation. Millionaire William K. Vanderbilt's Long Island Motor Parkway, remnants of which still remain, was the nation's first highway. The desolate ruins of an exiled Albanian king's estate lie in the midst of the woods of the Muttontown Preserve.

Driffield’s story is typical of any small market town, but, like these, its story is also unique, not only in its hey-day, with canal builders, railway barons and town-makers ensuring the leap from village to town, but also from earliest times with the visits of nomadic hunters and gatherers. We learn of its rich Anglo-Saxon past, and follow Driffield’s story meandering through the ages, unnoticed by the outside world, and through it all the recurrent theme of people working the land, tending, transforming, remoulding and conserving their common inheritance. This scholarly, yet ...

Hornsea is ordinary, no different from countless other towns and villages scattered across the face of England. Yet, at the same time, it is unique, a product of local conditions and forces, of ceasesless interactions between people and their environment over the last 10,000 years. It is this opposition that gives Hornsea meaning and character. A sense of place. In this new book, archaeologist and historian Stephen Harrison tells Hornsea’s particular story. The result is a fascinating biography of people and landscape, from prehistory to the present day, of generation piled upon ...

There are over fifty settlements in the world which bear the name 'Richmond', yet Richmond in North Yorkshire was the first and can claim to be the 'Mother of all Richmonds'. From the earliest days of human habitation in the Richmond area, to the building of the great castle and on to our own day, this new History of Richmond by Jane Hatcher tells the town's story with academic rigour yet in a form which makes it accessible to the general reader as well as the historian. Fully illustrated, the book contains an up-to-date and comprenesive bibliography for those who wish to take their studies...

The gentrification of Brooklyn has been one of the most striking developments in recent urban history. Considered one of the city's most notorious industrial slums in the 1940s and 1950s, Brownstone Brooklyn by the 1980s had become a post-industrial landscape of hip bars, yoga studios, and beautifully renovated, wildly expensive townhouses. In The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, Suleiman Osman offers a groundbreaking history of this unexpected transformation.

Francis Parkman was a noted 19th Century American historian who wrote widely about the American West.

A must-listen for all who enjoy Alaska history! Adventurers, crooks, and lawmen flooded into Alaska following the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898. Towns like Nome, Fairbanks, and Valdez blossomed on the tundra and soon filled with merchants, madams, miners, and more.

The University of California, Berkeley—widely known as "Cal"—is admired worldwide as a bastion of innovation and a hub for progressive thought. Far less known are the university's roots in plunder, warfare, and the promotion of white supremacy. As Tony Platt shows in The Scandal of Cal, these original sins sit at the center of UC Berkeley's history.

In Under the Dome, Alan Hantman, the Architect of the Capitol from 1997 to 2007, provides a personal account of how the Capitol works as a physical space; who runs it, how and why decisions are made about the security of the Capitol and the people who work there, and how politicians think about the Capitol Building.