Local History

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.

In 1664, England decided to invade the Dutch-controlled city of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York, had dreams of empire, and their archrivals, the Dutch, were in the way. But Richard Nicolls, who led the English flotilla bent on destruction, changed his strategy once he began parleying with Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch leader on Manhattan.

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.

The “Wild West” gunfighter is such a stock figure in our popular culture that some dismiss it all as a corny myth, more a product of dime novels and B movies than a genuinely important American history. In fact, as Bryan Burrough shows us in his dazzling and fast-paced new book, there’s much more below the surface. For three decades at the end of the 1800s, a big swath of the American West was a crucible of change, with the highest murder rate per capita in American history. The reasons behind this boil down to one word: Texas.

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.

New York City in the 1960s was the beating heart of the United States, a global metropolis thriving on its abundance and diversity. But in a short time, "Gotham" went through an extraordinary transition. The postwar golden years gave way to a frantic era of social, political, racial, and economic turmoil. Groups with their own distinct ideological aims gained a presence in the city. And with this frenzied new era came a new wave of violence.

Few cities are so dramatically identified with their environment as San Francisco—the landscape of hills, the expansive bay, the engulfing fog, and even the deadly fault line shifting below. Yet most residents think of the city itself as separate from the natural environment on which it depends. In Our Better Nature, Philip J. Dreyfus recounts the history of San Francisco from Indian village to world-class metropolis, focusing on the interactions between the city and the land and on the generations of people who have transformed them both.

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.

This book includes new heartbreaking stories, such as the seven canyoneers in 2015 who all died in a flash flood in Keyhole Canyon, two separate BASE jumping deaths, rock climbing, and flash flood deaths in the Narrows. Zion National Park is home to majestic and wondrous canyons, cliffs, crags, mesas, rivers, and slot canyons. World travelers remain in awe as they drive, walk, hike, and climb into such a unique place that is filled with vibrant, sacred, and mystical energy.

Most people only consider the Mississippi River when they cross it or when it inconveniently abandons its banks. But every year, millions of tons of cargo are transported by towboats on the river. In Peep Light, Captain Lee Hendrix provides unique insight on people who work and live on and near the Mississippi River. Hendrix, formerly a pilot for the Delta Queen Steamboat Co., has worked on the Mississippi for fifty years. In 2014, Hendrix became captain of the towboat Mississippi with the US Army Corps of Engineers, then he later retired to return to passenger vessels.

In 1976, Di Rushing and her husband, Sam decided to open the first winery in Mississippi. Their business was thriving by 1990, with eight national award-winning wines, a beautiful vineyard, and a successful restaurant. But in March of 1990, a series of unforeseen events rocked the operation. After the Rushings discovered one of the tour guides, Ray Russell, selling drugs in the winery parking lot, they fired him. He responded with a terrorizing vengeance that persisted over the next nine months.

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.

On October 8, 1862, Union and Confederate forces clashed near Perryville, Kentucky, in what would be the largest battle ever fought on Kentucky soil. The climax of a campaign that began two months before in Northern Mississippi, Perryville came to be recognized as the high water mark of the western Confederacy. Some said the hard-fought battle, forever remembered by participants for its sheer savagery and for their commanders' confusion, was the worst battle of the war, losing the last chance to bring the Commonwealth into the Confederacy.

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.

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.

This audiobook presents a history of Culver, Lake Maxinkuckee, and the Culver Military Academy. Interesting facts and a wealth of other information are found in A History of Culver and the Culver Military Academy. Culver, Indiana, has a rich and varied history as a resort town and the home of the famous Culver Educational Foundation. During more than a year of research, the author read the entire run of The Culver Herald and The Culver Citizen and worked with original sources never before published. Here is Culver and Culver Military Academy in all its grandeur.

No historian has been able to capture so elegantly the factors influencing the formation of the state of Texas. Three-time winner of the Jefferson Davis Award, William C. Davis precisely describes the spirit of the times during this momentous period. The conflicts between Anglo Texans, native Tejanos, and Mexican officials that led to war come to life with invigorating detail.

On the day the first shots of the Civil War were fired, a mob in Richmond clambered on top of the Capitol to raise the Confederate flag. Four years later, another flag was raised in its place while the city burned below. A 13-year-old girl compared the stars and stripes to "so many bloody gashes". This richly detailed, absorbing book brings to life the years in which Richmond was the symbol of Southern independence and the theater for a drama as splendid, sordid, and tragic as the war itself.

Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore National Memorial, hoped that ten thousand years from now, when archaeologists came upon the four sixty-foot presidential heads carved in the Black Hills of South Dakota, they would have a clear and graphic understanding of American civilization. Great White Fathers is at once the biography of a man and the biography of a place, told through travelogue, interviews, and investigation of the unusual records that one odd American visionary left behind.

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