Local History

The past 60 years have shaped and reshaped the group of French-speaking Louisiana people known as the Cajuns. During this period they have become much like other Americans and yet have remained strikingly distinct. The Cajuns: Americanization of a People explores these six decades and analyzes the forces that had an impact on Louisiana's Acadiana.

Kellogg in the late 1940s and 50s was a typical American small town complete with high school football and basketball teams, marching band, and anti-Communist clubs; yet its bars, gambling dens, and brothels were entrenched holdovers from a rowdier frontier past. The Bunker Hill Mining Company, the largest employer, paid miners good wages for difficult, dangerous work, while the quest for lead, silver, and zinc denuded the mountainsides and laced the soil and water with contaminants.

Journey to Texas, 1833 offers the first English translation of Reise nach Texas. It brings to vivid life the personalities, scenic landscapes, and customs that Dunt encountered in colonial Texas on the eve of revolution, along with his many practical suggestions for Germans who intended to emigrate.

Drawing on a rich trove of documents never before available to scholars, the author sketches the early pioneers, their daily lives, their beliefs, and their struggles to survive and prosper in this isolated mountain community. In moving detail, this book brings to life its struggle to survive, and the tragedy of its demise.

During the bitter winter of 1786-87, Daniel Shays, a modest farmer and Revolutionary War veteran, and his compatriot Luke Day led an unsuccessful armed rebellion against the state of Massachusetts. Their desperate struggle was fueled by the injustice of a regressive tax system and a conservative state government that seemed no better than British colonial rule.

As gentrification encroaches on historic Harlem, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award recipient Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts untangles the myth and meaning of its storied legacy. Drawing on Harlem’s history and her own observations, Rhodes-Pitts introduces a variety of observers who shared a common hope that Harlem would become the ground from which Blacks fully entered America’s democracy.

"Stickeen.... pushed his head past my shoulders, looked down and across, then looked me in the face and began to mutter and whine; saying as plainly as if speaking with words, "Surely, you are not going into that awful place. "As the darkness of a freezing night approaches, an experienced American naturalist and a dog are trapped on an Alaskan Glacier. This is a true story, written by one of the United States' most famous naturalists and explorers.

David E. Stuart incorporates extensive new research findings through groundbreaking archaeology to explore the rise and fall of the Chaco Anasazi and how it parallels patterns throughout modern societies in this new edition.

This serves as the third volume of a series covering the amazing 50 states. It looks at the facts about each state, its history, and interesting little tidbits of information about each. In this volume Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa are covered.

Gottfried Keller wurde 1819 in Zürich geboren. Er starb 1890 ebenfalls in Zürich. "Kleider machen Leute" (1874) ist wohl die bekannteste Novelle Kellers aus dem Zyklus "Die Leute von Seldwyla". Zahlreiche Verfilmungen und Vertonungen hat das Werk erfahren. Keller vereint hier meisterlich komische Gesellschaftskritik mit einer poetischen Liebeshandlung. Als Satiriker nimmt Keller Eigen- und Standesdünkel ebenso aufs Korn wie Gutgläubigkeit und Unterwürfigkeit.

In this powerful, passionate chronicle, Noah Adams, the beloved host of NPR's All Things Considered, takes us on a river journey through the heart of Appalachia - a journey shared by pioneers and preachers, white-water daredevils, bluegrass musicians, and an unforgettable cast of vivid historical characters.

Western outlaws terrorized the country during the late 1800s and early 1900s, robbing stagecoaches, banks, trains, and merchants. While they were fearsome, some became folk heroes and legends.

Deutschland zur Zeit der Französischen Revolution: Die Adelsfamilie der Baroness von C. flieht auf ihr rechtsrheinisches Gut, um mit Freunden der französischen Belagerung zu entkommen. Nach heftigen Auseinandersetzungen über die politische Lage beschließt die Gesellschaft, sich gegenseitig Geschichten zu erzählen - zur Aufheiterung und gegen den Verfall der Kultur und ihrer Welt.

The Cripple Creek District, on the back of Pikes Peak in central Colorado, first found fame through Bob Womack, the cowboy who publicized his knowledge of gold in the high country and drew thousands to the area. Gold fever allowed the region to flourish, while strikes, fires, and economic hardships threatened the district's survival. The dwindling population's fortitude, plus innovative ideas to boost the economy, carried the city from a struggling gold-miners' paradise to a favored tourist spot.

The Last Soul of Witherspoon takes a "global" approach in its history of a settlement school in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky known as Witherspoon College. Listeners will find this audiobook to be autobiographical as well as a social history told on three levels.

Frank Conroy first visited Nantucket with a gang of college friends in 1955. They came on a whim, and for Conroy it was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with this "small, relaxed oasis in the ocean." This book, part travel diary, part memoir, is a hauntingly evocative and personal journey through Nantucket: its sweeping dunes, rugged moors, remote beaches, secret fishing spots, and hidden forests and cranberry bogs. Admirers of Conroy’s classic and acclaimed memoir Stop-Time will again delight in what James Atlas called his "genius for close observation."

As I write this, I have before me on my desk, propped up against the telephone, an old rag doll. Dear old Raggedy Ann! The same Raggedy Ann with which my mother played when a child. There she sits, a trifle loppy and loose-jointed, looking me squarely in the face in a straightforward, honest manner, a twinkle where her shoe-button eyes reflect the electric light. Evidently Raggedy has been to a tea party" today, for her face is covered with chocolate.

Among the darkest corners of Kentucky's past are the grisly feuds that tore apart the hills of Eastern Kentucky from the late 19th century until well into the 20th. Now, from the tangled threads of conflicting testimony, John Ed Pearce, Kentucky's best-known journalist, weaves engrossing accounts of six of the most notorious accounts to uncover what really happened and why. His story of those days of darkness brings to light new evidence, questions commonly held beliefs about the feuds.

Dan Manning has put together a compilation of stories about his ancestors and himself as each of them have interacted with anything equine. He is nearly as hybridized as the mules he writes about from his great, great grandfathers...one was a Belgian anarchist, one was a Kentucky abolitionist, and one was a missionary in the Indian Nation, to his great grandfathers...one was a teamster who became a hardware-man, and one was a circuit-riding preacher in Missouri.

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.