Small Town America

Behind every act of domestic terrorism there is someone's child whose life took a radical turn for reasons that often remain mysterious. Camilla Hall is a case in point: a pastor's daughter from small-town Minnesota who eventually joined the ranks of radicals in the notorious Symbionese Liberation Army before dying in a shootout with Los Angeles Police in May 1974. How could a "good girl" become one of the most wanted domestic terrorists in the United States? Rachael Hanel tells her story here, revealing both the deep humanity and the extraordinary circumstances of Camilla Hall's life.

Eat Like a Local: Illinois by author Elaine Joy Nicholson Small offers the inside scoop on food in Illinois, USA.

The lonely predicament of Carol Kennicott, caught between her desires for social reform and individual happiness, reflects the position in which America's turn-of-the-century "emancipated woman" found herself.

Batavia, New York—between Rochester and Buffalo—hosted its first professional baseball game in 1897. Despite decades of deindustrialization and evaporating middle-class jobs, the Batavia Muckdogs endured. When Major League Baseball cravenly shut them down in 2020—along with forty-one other minor league teams—the town fought back, reviving the Muckdogs as a summer league team comprised of college players.

When Andrew Apperley visits his brother David in the East, he brings along an unexpected companion. Andrew's giant wolf dog, Comanche, is so wild that he has to be chained up for the safety of others. However, when the Apperley brothers come across a man drowning in the East River, Comanche breaks loose from his chains and swims to the man's rescue.

Right after high school, Joe Goffman left sleepy Bush Falls, Connecticut, and never looked back. Then he wrote a novel savaging everything in town, a novel that became a national bestseller and a huge hit movie. Fifteen years later, Joe is struggling to avoid the sophomore slump with his next novel when he gets a call: his father's had a stroke, so it's back to Bush Falls for the town's most famous pariah. His brother avoids him, his former classmates beat him up, and the members of the book club just hurl their copies of Bush Falls at his house.

Ashford, Vermont, might look like your typical sleepy New England college town, but to the shadowy residents who live among the remains of its abandoned mills and factories, it's known as "Burntown". Eva Sandeski, known as "Necco" on the street, has been a part of this underworld for years, ever since the night her father, Miles, drowned in a flood that left her and her mother, Lily, homeless.

Andy Adams (1859-1935) was born to pioneer parents in Indiana, worked in Texas for a decade driving cattle, and settled in Colorado Springs, where he penned his cowboy narratives. The Log of a Cowboy chronicles a five-month drive of three thousand head of cattle from Brownsville, Texas, to the Blackfoot Indian Reservation in Montana. This classical work of fiction provides fascinating insights of everyday life on the Great Western Cattle Trail with a team of 12 cowhands, a cook, a horse wrangler and a foreman.

Clarinda, Iowa, population 5,000, sits two hours from anything. There, between the cornfields and hog yards, is a ball field with a bronze bust of a man named Merl Eberly, a baseball whisperer who specialized in second chances and lost causes. The statue was a gift from one of Merl's original long-shot projects, a skinny kid from the ghetto in Los Angeles who would one day become a beloved Hall of Fame shortstop: Ozzie Smith.

Joe Goffman was 15 years out from his sleepy hometown when he wrote Bush Falls, a searing critique of its people and institutions. The book was a runaway best seller, and led to an even more successful movie. Now, however, Joe's got a problem. His father has suffered a stroke, and that means that Joe has to go back to his birthplace after having successfully antagonized every person living there. Can Joe survive the reservoirs of hatred that have been waiting to pour down upon him? Just maybe.

"Have to keep that smile", said Booker Wright in the 1966 NBC documentary Mississippi: A Self-Portrait. At the time Wright was a waiter in a Whites-only restaurant and a local business owner who would become an unwitting icon of the civil rights movement. For he did the unthinkable: Before a national audience, he described what life was truly like for the Black people of Greenwood, Mississippi.

The story of a Civil War soldier finding his humanity in the face of horrible savagery. Emerging from the Civil War a shamed and broken man, Stephen Latch turns to a life of thievery and murder. Still hoping to uphold the values of the Confederacy, Latch sets his sights on the wealth of resources pouring westward from the northern United States, putting together a band of ruthless misfits to help him stake his claim of the riches of the caravans.

Clint Belmet's parents were killed in a Comanche raid when he was young, but that hasn't stopped him from taking a job leading freight caravans on the old Santa Fe Trail, from Saint Louis, Missouri, to Santa Fe, New Mexico - a route that goes right through Comanche territory. Here is the raw, primitive West of the early pioneers, great caravans of freighters rumbling across the deadly prairies, risking attack by Comanche.

Summer, 1851. Racial tensions in America were higher than ever. The year before, President Millard Fillmore had passed the Fugitive Slave Act to return runaway slaves to the South. In February, Congress had established the reservation system, forcing Native Americans to leave their homelands. White Americans were strengthening dominance over people of color across the continent. In Oregon City, one biracial man named Jacob Vanderpool found himself in the crosshairs of this racist discrimination.

For the first time since Blue Highways, Heat-Moon is back on the backroads. Roads to Quoz is his lyrical, funny, and touching account of a series of American journeys into small-town America.

From one of the bestselling western novelists of all time, comes another classic story. Templeton Lambeth had so desperately wanted a son - an heir to ride by his side through the vast, wild ranges just west of the Pecos River. But to his disappointment, his wife bore a girl. His hopes crushed and in denial, he decides to raise his daughter as if she were a boy. In honor of Lambeth's more successful brother, they named her: Terrill.

In Summer over Autumn, Howard Mansfield sifts through the commonplace and the forgotten to discover stories that tell us about ourselves and our place in the world - in this case, Hancock, New Hampshire.

From one of the most beloved Western authors comes an epic historical tale of adventure and romance in the great wilderness. Against the epic backdrop of the building of the Union Pacific Railroad across plains and deserts and through the mountains to meet up with the Southern Pacific in Utah comes a sprawling, historical tale. Warren Neale is a brilliant civil engineer who is constantly confronted with construction problems. He is sided by Larry Red King, a Texas gunfighter and friend.

From the best-selling novelist of the American West, comes a novel of romance, danger, and life along the trail.

A classic story of imperiled love on the western frontiers of 19th-century America. While a battle rages between two outlaw gangs in a remote Utah canyon, Jim Wales struggles to rescue Helen Herrick, who has been captured and held for ransom. Robbers' Roost tells the story of their personal struggle to escape the clutches of the murderous outlaws while simultaneously safeguarding their passion, one that is not likely to survive the beautiful, yet deadly, terrain and people of the old American West.