Local History

Popular culture has taught us to picture the Old West as a land of men, whether it's the lone hero on horseback or crowds of card players in a rough-and-tumble saloon. But the taming of the frontier involved plenty of women, too - and this book tells their stories. At first, female pioneers were indeed rare - when the town of Denver was founded in 1859, there were only five women among a population of almost a thousand. But the adventurers arrived, slowly but surely.

When 25-year-old Harry Walker was killed by a bear in Yellowstone Park in 1972, the civil trial prompted by his death became a proxy for bigger questions about American wilderness management that had been boiling for a century. At immediate issue was whether the Park Service should have done more to keep bears away from humans, but what was revealed as the trial unfolded was just how fruitless our efforts to regulate nature in the parks had always been.

The detectable identity of southern Louisiana's one-of-a-kind culture has been expressed in numerous descriptive phrases - "south of the South," "the northern tip of the Caribbean," "this folklore land." A strange, piquant, and savory mixture, it also has been likened to one of the region's signature dishes, gumbo.

Welcome to the George Inn near London Bridge; a cosy, wood-panelled, galleried coaching house a few minutes' walk from the Thames. Consider this: who else has made this their local over the last 600 years? Chaucer and his fellow pilgrims almost certainly drank in the George on their way to Canterbury. Shakespeare may have popped in from the nearby Globe, and we know that Dickens definitely did. Mail carriers changed their horses here, while sailors drank here before sailing.

For at least two centuries, the South's economy, politics, religion, race relations, fiction, music, foodways, and more have figured prominently in nearly all facets of American life. In A New History of the American South, W. Fitzhugh Brundage joins a stellar group of accomplished historians in gracefully weaving a new narrative of southern history from its ancient past to the present.

The Huck Finn of foreign correspondents provides a colorful account of old Honolulu, the island nobility, the City of Refuge on the Kona coast, and the active volcano of Kilauea. These selections of Mark Twain's newspaper dispatches are both charming and informative. The light touch of the great humorist is seldom missing as he reveals the "loveliest fleet of islands that lie anchored in any ocean".

Inventing Paradise: The Power Brokers Who Created the Dream of Los Angeles traces the improbable rise of Los Angeles through the prism of six visionaries who had outsize influence on the city’s growth: Phineas Banning, Harrison Gray Otis, Henry Huntington, Harry Chandler, William Mulholland, and Moses Sherman.

With the same ability to make personalities and events come alive that characterizes his classic Skid Road, Murray Morgan here tells the colorful story of Tacoma, "the City of Destiny," and southern Puget Sound, where many major events of Washington's history took place. Drawing upon original journals and reports, Morgan builds Puget's Sound around individuals, interweaving portraits of well-known historical figures with a raucous parade of saloonkeepers, politicians, union organizers, schemers, and swindlers.

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.

When Dawn House purchased a teetering cabin in Southern Utah, she didn't have it torn down for scrap but began to examine the layers of its wallpaper, encrusted with paste and the yellow of time. She found an extraordinary story within: of pioneer misfortune, lost loves, struggles against nature, ordinary homesteading, and the formation of modern Utah.

This book tells the story of a time when society was divided and Harvard was becoming what it is today. It is not an exhaustive biography, but it has family information which puts things in perspective, and tells how he and Mather, who were about the same age, lived through the Salem witch trials. Leverett was busy writing logic textbooks in Latin at the time, but didn't dare speak out against the leader of the colony.

The revolutionary Ohio Valley is often depicted as a chaotic Hobbesian dystopia, in which Indians and colonists slaughtered each other at every turn. In Unsettling the West, Rob Harper overturns this familiar story. Rather than flailing in a morass, the peoples of the revolutionary Ohio Valley actively and persistently sought to establish a new political order that would affirm their land claims, protect them against attack, and promote trade.

Northern Ireland, 1975. Violence has erupted on the streets of Belfast. After years as a guerilla army, the IRA is clashing with Loyalist gangs and heavily armed British soldiers. But the Troubles have spilled beyond the island: An ocean away, in the heart of Philadelphia’s Irish enclave, a teenage girl finds a letter in her mailbox. Inside is a bullet, and the message is clear: The next one is for you or your family. As reporter Ali Watkins reveals, the conflict in Northern Ireland might have gone very differently had it not been for a small ragtag band of gunrunners in the United States.

In Paddleways of Mississippi: Rivers and People of the Magnolia State, listeners will discover flowing details of virtually every waterway in the state—the features, wildlife, vegetation, geology, hydrology, and specific challenges to be expected—alongside many wonderful historical and social accounts specific to each system.

Countering the conventional narrative that Florida's tourism industry suffered during the Great Depression, this book shows that the 1930s were the starting point for much that characterizes modern Florida's tourism. David Nelson argues that state and federal government programs designed to reboot the economy during this decade are crucial to understanding the state today.

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.

An expansive and revelatory historical exploration of the multicultural, water-seeking, land-destroying settlers of the most arid corner of North America, arguing that in order to know where the United States is going in the era of mass migration and climate crisis we must understand where the Southwest has already been.

From the 1880s to the 1950s, the Harvey Girls went west to work in Fred Harvey's restaurants along the Santa Fe railway. At a time when there were "no ladies west of Dodge City and no women west of Albuquerque," they came as waitresses, but many stayed and settled, founding the struggling cattle and mining towns that dotted the region. Interviews and historical research help recreate the Harvey Girl experience. The accounts are personal, but laced with the history the women lived.

At the height of the Great Depression, Sam Babb, the charismatic basketball coach of tiny Oklahoma Presbyterian College, began dreaming. Like so many others, he wanted a reason to have hope. Traveling from farm to farm, he recruited talented, hardworking young women and offered them a chance at a better life: a free college education if they would come play for his basketball team, the Cardinals. Despite their fears of leaving home and the sacrifices faced by their families, the women followed Babb and his dream.

Listen to this audiobook today to learn about the History of Arizona and New Mexico!