Local History

Saved at the Seawall is the definitive history of the largest ever waterborne evacuation. Jessica DuLong reveals the dramatic story of how the New York Harbor maritime community heroically delivered stranded commuters, residents, and visitors out of harm's way. Even before the US Coast Guard called for "all available boats," tugs, ferries, dinner boats, and other vessels had sped to the rescue from points all across New York Harbor. In less than nine hours, captains and crews transported nearly half a million people from Manhattan.

On July 16, 1945, just weeks before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that brought about the surrender of Japan and the end of WWII, the US unleashed the world's first atomic bomb at the Trinity testing site located in the remote Tularosa Valley in New Mexico. In The First Atomic Bomb Janet Farrell Brodie explores the history of the Trinity test and those whose contributions have rarely been discussed—the men and women who constructed, served, and witnessed the first test—as well as the downwinders who suffered the consequences of radiation.

We all know of Theodore Roosevelt being the US president from 1901 to 1909, an American politician, statesman, soldier, conservationist, and naturalist. BUT few know of him being an acclaimed historian. Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West quickly became a bestseller. The first edition of his book sold out in little more than a month and helped establish Roosevelt as a literary man and scholar, placing him on a path toward future greatness.

Nagle chronicles New York City's 400-year struggle with trash and traces the city's waste-management efforts from a time when filth overwhelmed the streets to the far more rigorous practices of today, when the Big Apple is as clean as it's ever been. Throughout, Nagle reveals the many unexpected ways in which sanitation workers stand between our seemingly well-ordered lives and the sea of refuse that would otherwise overwhelm us. In the process, she changes the way we understand cities—and ourselves within them.

Pervasive myths of European domination and indigenous submission in the Americas receive an overdue corrective in this far-reaching revisionary work. Within the indigenous borderlands of the Americas, as this volume shows, Native peoples exercised considerable power, often retaining control of the land, and remaining paramount agents of historical transformation after the European incursion. Conversely, European conquest and colonialism were typically slow and incomplete, as the newcomers struggled to assert their authority.

The Crossing is a revelatory new history of El Paso that recasts the city as the unacknowledged cradle of American history, where cultures have encountered each other for centuries and forged a thriving multi-ethnic community far ahead of the rest of the nation.

The Spanish word cimarron, meaning "wild" or "untamed," refers to a region in the southern Rocky Mountains where control of timber, gold, coal, and grazing lands long bred violent struggle. After the United States occupation following the 1846-1848 war with Mexico, this tract of nearly two million acres came to be known as the Maxwell Land Grant. When Cimarron Meant Wild presents a new history of the collision that occurred over the region's resources between 1870 and 1900.

In 1980, Exxon U.S.A., the world's largest corporation, began development of a five-billion-dollar oil shale industry in the pristine Colorado River Valley. Within eighteen months, Exxon had canceled its elaborate Colony project and 2,100 workers were immediately laid off. Boomtown Blues chronicles the social, environmental, and economic havoc created by one of the most expensive boom and bust cycles in the history of the American West.

British demands to move the northern border as far south as the Ohio River put New York on the first line of defense. But it was the leadership of Governor Daniel D. Tompkins that distinguished the state’s contribution to the war effort, effectively mobilizing the considerable human and material resources that proved crucial to maintaining the nation’s sovereignty. New York’s War of 1812 shows how, despite a widespread antiwar movement and fierce partisan politics, Tompkins managed to corral and maintain support—until 1814, when Britain agreed to peace.

The images of the burning towers, the heartbroken friends building memorials, the minute-by-minute accounts of the horrors of that day - all are indelibly etched on our collective consciousness. But what of those left behind after 9/11? What have they, and we, learned from the gift of time? In Project Rebirth, a psychologist and a journalist examine the lives of eight people who were directly affected by the events of September 11, 2001.

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

Whiting, Indiana Saturday, August 27, 1955 Sunrise, 6:11 a.m. Its 80 degrees in the shade, and most of the city's residents are still trying to sleep off an airless, oppressive night. But inside the plant at Whiting's biggest employer (and one of the worlds largest oil refineries), something has gone horribly wrong, something that threatens to destroy the entire community. The clock changes. 6:12 a.m. This is the story of what happened at one minute after sunrise on that cataclysmic day in 1955, spoken in the words of the people who lived through it.

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.

Northeast Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley was truly a dark and bloody ground, the site of murders, massacres, and pitched battles. The valley's turbulent history was the product of a bitter contest over property and power known as the Wyoming controversy.

Lone Star Nation is the gripping story of Texas' precarious journey to statehood, from its early colonization in the 1820s to the shocking massacres of Texas loyalists at the Alamo and Goliad by the Mexican army, from its rough-and-tumble years as a land overrun by the Comanches to its day of liberation as an upstart republic.

In Washington, award-winning author Fergus M. Bordewich turns his eye to the backroom deal making and shifting alliances among our Founding Fathers and in so doing pulls back the curtain on the lives of the slaves who actually built the city.

St. Louis, despite its status as an inland river city frequently relegated to the backwaters of national significance, has stood at the crossroads of international matters for much of its history. From its 18th-century French fur trade origins to post-Cold War business dealings with Latin America and Asia, the city has never neglected nor been ignored by the world outside its borders.

Freedom, Land & Community: A History of McLean County Illinois, 1730-1900 tells the story of the diverse peoples and events of this county. Using sources contemporary with the events described, it relates the struggles to build communities and secure freedom - or a freedom as each community defined it. Native peoples, women and men, African Americans, Irish and German immigrants all sought and contested for their freedom. People whose voices have not been heard in previous works about central Illinois are included here.

Though today it can seem as if all American culture comes out of New York and Los Angeles, much of what defined the nation as it grew into a superpower was produced in Chicago. Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to-coast journey included a stop there, and this flow of people and commodities made it America’s central clearinghouse, laboratory, and factory.

Lincoln's Citadel is a fresh, absorbing narrative history of Lincoln’s leadership in Civil War Washington. Here is the vivid story of how the Lincoln administration met the immense challenges the war posed to the city, transforming a vulnerable capital into a bastion for the Union.