Local History

The End of the Golden Gate is a penetrating journey that illuminates both what makes San Francisco so magnetizing and how it has changed vastly over time. With essays chronicling the impact of the tech-industry invasion and the evolution, gentrification, and radical cost of living that has transformed San Francisco's most beloved neighborhoods, these prescient essayists capture the lasting imprint of the 1960s counterculture movement, as well as the fight to preserve the art, music, and other creative movements that make this forever the city of love.

James L. Leloudis and Robert R. Korstad tell the story of race and voting rights, from the end of the Civil War until the present day. They show that battles over the franchise have played out through cycles of emancipatory politics and conservative retrenchment. When race has been used as an instrument of exclusion from political life, the result has been a society in which vast numbers of Americans are denied the elements of meaningful freedom: a good job, a good education, good health, and a good home.

How do we draw the lines between "good" and "bad" neighborhoods? How do we know “ghettos”? This book questions the widely held assumption that divisions between urban areas are reflections of varying amounts of crime, deprivation, and other social, cultural, and economic problems. Using Ogden, Utah, as a case study, Pepper Glass argues that urban reputations are “moral frontiers” that uphold and create divides between who is a good and respectable - or a bad and vilified - member of a community.

The classic dog story Stickeen is John Muir's account of what happened on an Alaskan glacier with a little dog named Stickeen. One day, Muir went exploring a large glacier during a blizzard, with Stickeen in tow. They became stranded, and the only way out was across a precarious ice bridge. Both man and dog escaped, and this triumph changed Stickeen from a rather aloof canine into a devoted companion. Muir called his adventure with Stickeen "the most memorable of all my wild days”, and wrote that the little dog enlarged his life by extended its boundaries.

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.

In 2008, three years after Hurricane Katrina cut a deadly path along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, researchers J. Steven Picou and Keith Nicholls conducted a survey of the survivors in Louisiana and Mississippi, receiving more than 2500 responses, and followed up two years later with more than 500 of the initial respondents. Showcasing these landmark findings, Caught in the Path of Katrina: A Survey of the Hurricane's Human Effects yields a more complete understanding of the traumas endured as a result of the Storm of the Century. 

The appointment of a Supreme Court Justice is an event of major significance in American politics. Each appointment is of consequence because of the enormous judicial power the Supreme Court exercises as the highest appellate court in the federal judiciary. To receive appointment to the Court, a candidate must first be nominated by the president and then confirmed by the Senate.

History is recorded in many ways. According to author James Deetz, the past can be seen most fully by studying the small things so often forgotten. In his completely revised and expanded edition of In Small Things Forgotten, Deetz has added new sections that more fully acknowledge the presence of women and African Americans in Colonial America.

As a new president takes the White House, Just Cause returns to New York City for the first time in eight years, under the command of its newest leader: Mustang Sally. But not everyone is excited about the expansion of Just Cause. Senator Christine Goodwin, slighted by the team's leadership years before, has made it her mission to put all para-humans on a very short leash while, at the same time, creating her own super-powered militia.  

Seventh-grade Superheroes! It's not easy being a 12-year-old superhero, but the five kids of the neighborhood watch are doing the best they can. La Capitána: super-strong flier. Wheels: brilliant inventor. Hothead: catches on fire. Breezy: controls wind. Rascal: super-skateboarding. From their headquarters built into a repurposed Winnebago, they patrol the streets and alleys of their small hometown and dream of being big time heroes like Mustang Sally and the rest of Just Cause.

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this Greater Than a Tourist book is for you. Greater than a Tourist- New Mexico, USA, by Jeff Christensen offers the inside scoop on America’s 47th state. Most travel books tell you how to travel like a tourist. Although there is nothing wrong with that, as part of the Greater Than a Tourist series, this book will give you travel tips from someone who has lived at your next travel destination. In this audiobook, you will discover advice that will help you throughout your stay.

Decades of cuts to local government amidst rising concentrations of poverty have wreaked havoc on communities left behind by the modern economy. Forty years after the anti-tax revolution began protecting wealthy taxpayers and their cities, our high-poverty cities and counties have run out of services to cut, properties to sell, bills to defer, and risky loans to take. In The Fight to Save the Town, urban law expert and author Michelle Wilde Anderson offers unsparing, humanistic portraits of the hardships left behind in four such places.

The Stafford-Townsend feud began with an 1871 shootout in Columbus, Texas, followed by the deaths of the Stafford brothers in 1890. The second phase blossomed after 1898 with the assassination of Larkin Hope, and concluded in 1911 with the violent deaths of Marion Hope, Jim Townsend, and Will Clements, all in the space of one month.

Alexander Hamilton started his life in the British West Indies. His story seems like a classic tale from rags to riches, of a poor boy whose hard work and perseverance allowed him to become one of the greatest historical figures of a nation. Alexander Hamilton left behind an impressive legacy, in no small part due to his success in defining the economic and political systems of the United States.

Early in the crisis, a global volunteer collaboration called Pivot Projects was formed to rethink how the world works. Some members are experts in the sciences and the humanities; others are environmental activists or regular people who see themselves as world citizens. In The Pivot, the journalist Steve Hamm - who embedded in the enterprise from the start - explores their efforts and shows how their approach provides a model for achieving systemic change.