Showing titles in State & Local

Over seven generations, Jessica Goudeau’s family members were church elders, preachers, Sunday school teachers and potluck organizers. Her great-grandfather helped establish a Christian university in Abilene, Texas, which she attended along with her grandparents, parents, siblings, and cousins. Her family's legacy—a word she heard often growing up—was rooted in faithfulness, righteousness, and the hard work that built the great state of Texas.

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.

Historian Miguel Ángel González-Quiroga draws on national archives, letters, consular records, periodicals, and a host of other sources to give voice to borderlanders' perspectives as he weaves their many, varied stories into one sweeping narrative. The tale he tells is one of economic connections and territorial disputes, of refugees and bounty hunters, speculation and stake holding, smuggling and theft, and other activities in which economic considerations often carried more weight than racial prejudice.

The Hairstons is the extraordinary story of the largest family in America, the Hairston clan. With several thousand black and white members, the Hairstons share a complex and compelling history: divided in the time of slavery, they have come to embrace their past as one family.

In 1991, the Kennedy brothers first published The South Was Right!, launching the modern movement of Southern awareness and activism. To date, the first and second edition of this book have sold more than 135,000 copies! Not for the faint of heart, The South Was Right! is an authoritative and well-documented study of the mythology behind “Civil War” history and its ongoing effects. In their new edition for a 21st-century audience, the Kennedys have updated their message to provide guidance for the harsh conditions against liberty.

For more than 20 years historians have expressed the critical need for a single-volume history of Appalachia in Virginia. Responding to this demand, the author of this text has woven together the various strands of the Appalachian experience into a sweeping whole.

On October 12, 2005, a massive fire broke out in the Wines Central wine warehouse in Vallejo, California. Within hours, the flames had destroyed 4.5 million bottles of California's finest wine worth more than $250 million, making it the largest destruction of wine in history. The fire had been deliberately set by a passionate oenophile named Mark Anderson, a skilled con man and thief with storage space at the warehouse who needed to cover his tracks.

Since 1980, the number of people in US prisons has increased more than 450 percent. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world". Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces conjoined to produce the prison boom.

When 14-year-old Carlotta Walls walked up the stairs of Little Rock Central High School on September 25, 1957, she and eight other Black students only wanted to make it to class. But the journey of the “Little Rock Nine”, as they came to be known, would lead the nation on an even longer and much more turbulent path, one that would challenge prevailing attitudes, break down barriers, and forever change the landscape of America.

Broadway takes us on a mile-by-mile journey that traces the gradual evolution of the 17th century's Brede Wegh, a muddy cow path in a backwater Dutch settlement, to the 20th century's Great White Way. We learn why one side of the street was once considered more fashionable than the other; witness construction of the Ansonia Apartments, Trinity Church, and the Flatiron Building and the burning of P. T. Barnum's American Museum; and discover that Columbia University was built on the site of an insane asylum.

Emmett Till offers the first truly comprehensive account of the 1955 murder and its aftermath. It tells the story of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago brutally lynched for a harmless flirtation at a country store in the Mississippi Delta. His death and the acquittal of his killers by an all-white jury set off a firestorm of protests that reverberated all over the world and spurred on the civil rights movement.

Three Roads to the Alamo is the definitive work about the lives of David Crockett, James Bowie, and William Barret Travis - the legendary frontiersmen and fighters who met their destiny at the Alamo in one of the most famous and tragic battles in American history - and about what really happened in that battle.

Sickles at Gettysburg by licensed battlefield guide James Hessler, is the most deeply-researched, full-length biography to appear on this remarkable American icon. No individual who fought at Gettysburg was more controversial, both personally and professionally, than Major General Daniel E. Sickles. By 1863, Sickles was notorious as a disgraced former Congressman who murdered his wife’s lover on the streets of Washington and used America’s first temporary insanity defense to escape justice.

Rich history, important figures, and massive events that rocked the entire continent; each of the 50 states comprising the United States has been the scene of enormous moments in history that are the subject of study all over the world. Knowing such facts and being able to recognize the details of culture, folklore, and sports (among many other pieces of trivia) are gifts that very few have, even those that can boast living in certain states all of their lives.

They called him Mickey Free. His kidnapping started the longest war in American history, and both sides - the Apaches and the white invaders - blamed him for it. A mixed-blood warrior who moved uneasily between the worlds of the Apaches and the American soldiers, he was never trusted by either but desperately needed by both. He was the only man Geronimo ever feared. He played a pivotal role in this long war for the desert Southwest from its beginning in 1861 until its end in 1890 with his pursuit of the renegade scout Apache Kid.

Disappointment River is a dual historical narrative and travel memoir that at once transports listeners back to the heroic age of North American exploration and places them in a still rugged but increasingly fragile Arctic wilderness in the process of profound alteration by the dual forces of energy extraction and climate change.

During the Roaring Twenties, two of the most revered and influential men in American business proposed to transform one of the country’s poorest regions into a dream technological metropolis, a shining paradise of small farms, giant factories, and sparkling laboratories. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison’s “Detroit of the South” would be 10 times the size of Manhattan, powered by renewable energy, and free of air pollution. And it would reshape American society.

On April 15, 2013, two homemade bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston marathon, killing three people and wounding more than 264 others. In the ensuing manhunt, Tamerlan Tsarnaev died, and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, was captured and ultimately charged on 30 federal counts. Yet long after the bombings and the terror they sowed, after all the testimony and debate, what we still haven't learned is why. Why did the American dream go so wrong for two immigrants?

Eight captivating manuscripts in one audiobook: The Wild West, Billy the Kid, Buffalo Bill, Seth Bullock, Davy Crockett, Annie Oakley, Jesse James, and Geronimo. Some of the topics covered in part one of this audiobook include: What the Native Americans of the West were really like before colonization, how the Spanish were some of the first Europeans to explore the West, the seven years during which Texas was its own country, and much, much more!

In the wake of the financial crisis, the number of anchor-outs living in Richardson Bay more than doubles as their long-simmering feud with the wealthy residents of Marin County—one of the richest counties in the country—finally boils over. Many of the shoreline’s well-heeled yacht club members and mansion owners blame their unhoused neighbors for rising crime on the waterfront. Meanwhile, local politicians accuse them of destroying the Bay Area’s marine ecosystem and demand their eviction.