Town Histories

Aliquippa, Pennsylvania is famous for two things: the Jones and Laughlin Steel mill, an industrial behemoth that helped win World War II; and football, with a high school team that has produced numerous NFL stars, including Mike Ditka and Darrelle Revis. But the mill, once the fourth largest producer in America, closed for good in 2000. What happens to a town when a dream dies? Does it just disappear?

Vietnam was a world away from the rolling hills of rural Kentucky. For Alton, most everything he had ever known or loved could be found among the lush green trees and blue rushing waters of his daddy's farm. Follow God's plan, he told himself, over and over again while serving his country. And it was a prevalent theme in his letters home to his family and friends. As Written is an ageless story of hope, love, and loss told through the eyes of a soldier who wants nothing more than to make his family proud and return safely home as soon as is possible. Coming from a faith-based family, he ...

Andy Adams (1859-1935) was born to pioneer parents in Indiana, worked in Texas for a decade driving cattle, and settled in Colorado Springs, where he penned his cowboy narratives. The Log of a Cowboy chronicles a five-month drive of three thousand head of cattle from Brownsville, Texas, to the Blackfoot Indian Reservation in Montana. This classical work of fiction provides fascinating insights of everyday life on the Great Western Cattle Trail with a team of 12 cowhands, a cook, a horse wrangler and a foreman.

"Have to keep that smile", said Booker Wright in the 1966 NBC documentary Mississippi: A Self-Portrait. At the time Wright was a waiter in a Whites-only restaurant and a local business owner who would become an unwitting icon of the civil rights movement. For he did the unthinkable: Before a national audience, he described what life was truly like for the Black people of Greenwood, Mississippi.

The area that became known as the Old Northwest caught the eye of European settlers as far back as the 17th century, when the French explorers Marquette and Jolliet found that waterways in the area connected the Mississippi River to the Great Lakes. The area was perfect for fur trade outposts before it was settled by whites. Throughout the 19th century, American settlers pushing across the Western frontier came into contact with diverse American tribes, producing a series of conflicts ranging from the Great Plains to the Southwest, and from the Trail of Tears to the Pacific Northwest.

Based on the personalities who created America’s Early Colonial Period, Footprints in History, combines imagination and historic events to tell of the author’s sixth great-grandfather, blacksmith and indentured servant, James Fitchett. James and his neighbors toil in the new land for the twenty-four Scottish investors, known as proprietors. These men control East New Jersey hoping to amass fortunes from the sweat and tears of their tenants, indentured servants, and slaves. Not all settlers share the same hopes and beliefs. Footprints in History reveals the winners and the losers

The Lindsay family has come west hoping to help the father, John, recover from an illness. When they arrive, they are induced to purchase Spanish Peaks Ranch, an abandoned United States military post surrounded by mountains. It seems like a perfect place to settle into their new life as ranchers. As they soon find out, though, this deserted fort is equally suited for both protection and imprisonment.

Royalty...it was more than just a word to her. It was her life. But not for long. Marlie loved her family dearly, even when she didn’t like them very much. But their life wasn’t the life she wanted for herself. Maggie had always fulfilled her responsibilities, she’d always done exactly as she was expected to...she knew no other way. Until now...until after reading a letter from her father suggesting she visit her niece and learn how to do as she pleased every once in a while, including the joy of eating pizza at her slightest whim. The last thing Maggie expected when she showed up at ...

Clarinda, Iowa, population 5,000, sits two hours from anything. There, between the cornfields and hog yards, is a ball field with a bronze bust of a man named Merl Eberly, a baseball whisperer who specialized in second chances and lost causes. The statue was a gift from one of Merl's original long-shot projects, a skinny kid from the ghetto in Los Angeles who would one day become a beloved Hall of Fame shortstop: Ozzie Smith.

Little Starhorodivka, a village of three streets, lies in Ukraine's Grey Zone, the no-man's-land between loyalist and separatist forces. Thanks to the lukewarm war of sporadic violence and constant propaganda that has been dragging on for years, only two residents remain: retired safety inspector turned beekeeper Sergey Sergeyich and Pashka, a 'frenemy' from his schooldays. With little food and no electricity, under ever-present threat of bombardment, Sergeyich's one remaining pleasure is his bees.

Who knew buying a chest of odds and ends at a yard sale could be dangerous? In an instant, Emily London goes from being thrilled to fighting for her life. Luckily, Quinn Lawson is there to save the day. The moment Quinn saw Emily, he knew he found the treasure he’d been looking for in his life. Now, the only problem is keeping her safe. Together, they search his family history to figure out what is so important about an old key and his great-grandmother’s sewing box that some would kill for.

The story of the American mining frontier can be traced in the ghost towns - from the camps of California's forty-niners to the 20th-century ruins in the Nevada desert. They mark an epoch of high adventure, of quick wealth and quicker poverty, of gambling and gun-slinging and hell-raising. We who have seen too many Western movies sometimes think that the legends of the Wild West were invented by scriptwriters - but the ghost towns remain.

Nothing casts a more sinister shadow over our nation's history than the gruesome lynchings that happened between 1882 and 1937, claiming 4,680 victims. Often, in a show of racist violence, the lynchers tortured their victims before murdering them. Most killers were never brought to justice; some were instead celebrated as heroes, their victims' bodies displayed or even cut up and distributed as trophies.

It’s the summer of 1919, and Ellen O’Brien has her whole life ahead of her. Young, in love and leaving home for her first job, the future seems full of shining possibility. But war is brewing, and before long, Ellen and everyone around her are swept up by it. As Ireland is torn apart by the turmoil, Ellen finds herself facing the ultimate test of love and loyalty. A hundred years later and Clare Farrell has inherited a dilapidated old farmhouse in County Meath.

Virginia Foster is an empty nester who takes on the mission of bringing her town, Abundance, South Carolina, back from economic doldrums after the disappearance of cotton mills in the 1990s. The answer: a festival to bring attention and jobs back to Abundance. As she and her team of fellow retirees work to build the first South Carolina Biscuit Festival (because the town got its name from Abundance Mills Flour Company), they face opposition from a local preacher, the art community, and the town’s maven of baby beauty pageants. And Virginia finds out the mysteries behind her family--who ...

From one of the bestselling western novelists of all time, comes another classic story. Templeton Lambeth had so desperately wanted a son - an heir to ride by his side through the vast, wild ranges just west of the Pecos River. But to his disappointment, his wife bore a girl. His hopes crushed and in denial, he decides to raise his daughter as if she were a boy. In honor of Lambeth's more successful brother, they named her: Terrill.

When Andrew Apperley visits his brother David in the East, he brings along an unexpected companion. Andrew's giant wolf dog, Comanche, is so wild that he has to be chained up for the safety of others. However, when the Apperley brothers come across a man drowning in the East River, Comanche breaks loose from his chains and swims to the man's rescue.

The Queen of the Coast. The World’s Playground. The Casino Capital of the East. They can only describe Atlantic City, New Jersey. Beloved, maligned, always-hustling since its 1854 founding, the seaside resort has seen it all: first class hotels, popular amusements on the world famous Boardwalk and its piers, Prohibition, gangsters, speakeasies, conventioneers, celebrities, urban pride, urban decay, a casino revival, a casino collapse—and it hasn’t given up yet. Boardwalk Playground shares a hundred stories of Atlantic City’s high spots and low points of the past century and a half, ...

One of the bestselling novelists of the American West brings us a gripping tale of gold, greed, and vengeance.

Welcome to Beaumont Cove, a slowly decaying tourist town at the edge of the world, and the place where Maggie James’s worst fears for her estranged twin sister, Lilly, have come true. Lilly is dead, and Maggie has arrived to identify her body. Lilly’s husband, Mike, is in custody for her murder. With the help of the local sheriff, a retired private investigator, and a strange but friendly carnival psychic, Maggie begins to uncover the truth about what really happened to her sister. But the truth comes at a price....