Local History

In America Walks into a Bar, Christine Sismondo recounts the rich and fascinating history of an institution often reviled, yet always central to American life. She traces the tavern from England to New England, showing how even the Puritans valued "a good Beere".

The Mound Builder Myth is the first book to chronicle the attempt to recast the Native American burial mounds as the work of a lost white race of “true” native Americans. Thomas Jefferson’s pioneering archaeology concluded that the earthen mounds were the work of Native Americans. In the 1894 report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Cyrus Thomas concurred, drawing on two decades of research. But in the century in between, the lie took hold, with presidents Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Abraham Lincoln adding their approval.

The storm gathers as we sleep. Despite vast amounts of blood and treasure expended since 9-11-2001, America and her allies are losing the war against Islamist violent extremists. For the first time since the War on Terror began, Green Beret Scott Mann, an original architect and implementer of this strategic program, reveals an immediately useful strategic framework to defeat ISIS, al-Qa'ida, and even criminal elements here at home.

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.

This is a story of power, set against Puritan America and the English Civil War. Williams's interactions with King James, Francis Bacon, Oliver Cromwell, and his mentor Edward Coke set his course, but his fundamental ideas came to fruition in America, as Williams, though a Puritan, collided with John Winthrop's vision of his "City upon a Hill."

Schon nach kurzer Zeit im Wilden Westen erwirbt sich ein junger Landvermesser den Kriegsnamen Old Shatterhand - und den Respekt seines kauzigen Lehrmeisters. Als die Apachen die Vermessungsarbeiten unterbinden wollen, verbündet sich die korrupte Bauleitung mit den Kiowas. Doch Old Shatterhand kann die gefangenen Häuptlinge Intschu-tschuna und Winnetou retten. Allerdings muss er lange warten, bis er von ihnen als ihr Befreier anerkannt wird und der Blutsbruder Winnetous werden kann. Die Häuptlingstochter Nscho Tschi verliebt sich in ihn - ein junges Glück, das nur von kurzer Dauer ist.

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.

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.

An old farmer boasts that he has used the same ax his whole life -- he's only had to replace the handle three times and the head twice. In an eclectic, insightful meditation on the powerful impulse to preserve and restore, Howard Mansfield explores the myriad ways in which we attempt to reconnect with and recover the past -- to use the same ax twice.

In October 1913, 261 miners and two rescuers died when a massive explosion ripped through a mine operated by Phelps, Dodge & Company in Dawson, New Mexico. Ten years later, a second blast claimed the lives of another 120 miners. Today, Dawson is a deserted ghost town. All that remains is a sea of white iron crosses memorializing the nearly four hundred miners killed in the two explosions-a death toll unmatched by mine disasters in any other town in America.

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.

A lifetime of moments from the Maine coast to Boston to Capitol Hill. A series of vignettes about saving swimmer's lives, encounters with sharks, John Wayne, cows for tyrants, the FBI/CIA, the KGB, circus clowns, and dental records chicken.

11. september 2001 forsvandt tvillingetårnene i New York sammen med verden, som vi kendte den. En ny global tidsalder begyndte: krigen mod terror. Siden da har Danmark og resten af Vesten jagtet jihadister på tværs af kloden – fra Tora Bora i Afghanistan til Brabrand i Østjylland.

Imperial San Francisco is the epic saga of how all great cities parasitize their hinterlands for the sake of those elites who own and run them by using the mass media at their command to shape the thought of those who unwittingly serve their interests. Using San Francisco as an example of how cities employ remote control technology to exploit water, energy, natural resources, and labor from an expansive imperium, it takes the listener from ancient Rome to the University of California’s role in the creation of nuclear weaponry and its first use.

What began as the obscure local case of two Italian immigrant anarchists accused of robbery and murder flared into an unprecedented political and legal scandal as the perception grew that their conviction was a judicial travesty and their execution a political murder. This book is the first to reveal the full national and international scope of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, uncovering how and why the two men became the center of a global cause célèbre that shook public opinion and transformed America’s relationship with the world.

A sweeping, magisterial biography of the man generally considered the greatest president of the 20th century, admired by Democrats and Republicans alike. Traitor to His Class sheds new light on FDR's formative years, his remarkable willingness to champion the concerns of the poor and disenfranchised, his combination of political genius, firm leadership, and matchless diplomacy in saving democracy in America during the Great Depression and the American cause of freedom in World War II.

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

Gunflint Burning is a comprehensive account of the dramatic events around the Ham Lake fire of 2007, one of the largest wildfires in Minnesota history. In sharp detail, Cary J. Griffith describes the key events of the fire as they unfold, transporting listeners to the front lines of an epic struggle that was at times heroic, tragic, and sublime.

Stories provide the connective tissue of the South. The intrepid Pamela Petro drives from the Carolinas to the Appalachians to the Atlantic seaboard, from Virginia's valleys to Louisiana's swamps to meet the mesmerizing guardians of its history: the storytellers, who often double as local, or national, treasures. A gifted listener, Petro records how stories originate as well as how they are passed down. She paints vivid portraits of the tellers while compiling tales about Jack the trickster, boo-hags and plat-eyes, ghosts, and singing turtles.

Charles E. Chapin, the notorious editor-tyrant of Joseph Pulitzer's New York Evening World during America's Gilded Age, made headlines himself after murdering his wife of 39 years. This extensively researched biography brings to life Chapin's tragic story, from his childhood to his days spent cultivating a beautiful rose garden in Sing Sing prison to the last moments of his life.