Town Histories

Nuclear power once promised to be the solution to the world's energy crisis, but that all changed in the late twentieth century after multiple high-profile accidents and meltdowns. Power plant workers, finding themselves the subject of public opposition, became leery of reporters. But one plant in Zion, Illinois, allowed unrestricted access to one journalist: the Chicago Tribune's Casey Bukro. Bukro spent two years inside the Zion nuclear plant, interviewing employees, witnessing high-risk maintenance procedures, and watching the radiation exposure counter on his own dosimeter tick up and up.

Gail Sheehy traveled to Middletown shortly after the disaster and began in-depth interviews with many of the bereaved.

Middletown, America was written as the year progressed, following parallel and intertwining stories of selected individuals and their families. A mother who was doubly bereft when she lost her only son as he tried to fill the shoes of her absentee husband; the sole survivor in an office of 67 people who escaped the 88th floor of Tower 2 seconds before the floor was decimated.

At the height of the Syrian Civil War, deep beneath the shattered streets of rebel-held Darayya was a secret library. This basement room filled with thousands of books, rescued under constant sniper fire from gutted buildings, was an oasis of normality in a country at war with itself. Here, despite a devastating four-year siege, people risked their lives to read. Over a period of more than a year, Mike Thomson heard their extraordinary stories via tenuous Skype calls, emails, social media messages, and audio diaries recorded on their mobile phones.

Aliquippa, Pennsylvania is famous for two things: the Jones and Laughlin Steel mill, an industrial behemoth that helped win World War II; and football, with a high school team that has produced numerous NFL stars, including Mike Ditka and Darrelle Revis. But the mill, once the fourth largest producer in America, closed for good in 2000. What happens to a town when a dream dies? Does it just disappear?

Recounts the story of America’s last great newspaper war between the New York Daily News and the New York Post, as both papers’ long rivalry turned existential amid the rise of digital news. The story is told through the eyes of the reporters, or “runners”, and photographers who fought the war on the ground in cities across America.

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.

The Anchor Hocking Glass Company, once the world's largest maker of glass tableware, was the base on which Lancaster's society was built. As Glass House unfolds, bankruptcy looms. With access to the company and its leaders, and Lancaster's citizens, Alexander shows how financial engineering took hold in the 1980s, accelerated in the 21st century, and wrecked the company.

On January 7, 1994, residents of the Berkshire Hills woke up to a typical snowy winter day in the majestic woods of Western Massachusetts. The quaint New England towns, the idyllic scenery and the people who lived there could have stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

Trochenbrod was the only freestanding, fully realized Jewish town in history. It began with a few Jewish settlers searching for freedom from the Russian Czars’ oppressive policies, which included the forced conscriptions of one son from each Jewish family household throughout Russia. This scene of ethnic harmony was soon shattered, as Trochenbrod vanished in 1941 - her residents slaughtered, her homes, buildings, and factories razed to the ground.

Early one morning in the summer of 1999, authorities in the tiny West Texas town of Tulia began a roundup of suspected drug dealers. By the time the sweep was done, over 40 people had been arrested and one of every five black adults in town was behind bars, all accused of dealing cocaine to the same undercover officer, Tom Coleman.

Nothing casts a more sinister shadow over our nation's history than the gruesome lynchings that happened between 1882 and 1937, claiming 4,680 victims. Often, in a show of racist violence, the lynchers tortured their victims before murdering them. Most killers were never brought to justice; some were instead celebrated as heroes, their victims' bodies displayed or even cut up and distributed as trophies.

In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Alabama, began a legal fight against the agrochemical company Monsanto over the dumping of PCBs in the city's historically African American and white working-class west side. Simultaneously, Anniston environmentalists sought to safely eliminate chemical weaponry that had been secretly stockpiled near the city during the Cold War. In this probing work, Ellen Griffith Spears offers a compelling narrative of Anniston's battles for environmental justice.

In its youth, Portland, Oregon, was a bit like a rough-and-ready logging camp with a gritty, hard-punching deep-water port. Lusty lads dallied with hard-eyed beauties in dark alleys, and captains forked over “blood money” to buy men for their crews from shanghai operators. From the seedy waterfront to the notorious North End, Portland's sin sector offered vices packaged in pint glasses and perfumed corsets.

In "Master and Man," Bobbie is a black man who can outride, outfight, and outshoot any white man in the mountain desert. His unwavering moral code serves as a model for his often cruel and dissolute white master.

Follow young Mary's journey from India to the mysterious grand house in Yorkshire, England. Packed with interesting characters, positive thinking, and bursting with nature, The Secret Garden continues to enthrall and educate children and adults alike. Subtle sound effects, along with evenly paced reading, makes this adaptation a delight to listen to.

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.

After five years of virtual banishment because he sold out his small outfit to the Middle Arizona Cattle Company, giving it a foothold on the Mesa Grande range, violent-tempered Joe Bonnyman is summoned back to Lodgepole by his father when it appears that a cattle war between the syndicate and the various rangers is imminent. During his short stay in town, Joe has an unpleasant meeting with Ed Merrill, the brother of a girl Joe had once courted.

Born in Brooklyn, Sammy Gregg is small in stature and naive to the ways of the world, yet headstrong and resolute to save enough money to marry Susie Mitchell. Gregg calculates that he needs $15‚000 and figures he can earn enough in six months out west. Although he is a small man who knows nothing of fighting‚ guns‚ or horses‚ he takes his $5‚000 in savings and heads west‚ arriving in Munson‚ a tough, lawless town.

The battles of Trenton and Princeton have been the subject of several recent books, but this story complements them by expanding the story to include the many experiences of the people of Princeton in the wider Revolution and their contributions to it. This story combines social history with the better known military and political history of the Revolution. It does not just deal with amorphous groups and institutions, but rather with individuals working with and affected by various groups on both sides of the conflict.

Being a student at Americus High School was the worst experience of Greg Wittkamper's life. Greg came from a nearby Christian commune, Koinonia, whose members devoutly and publicly supported racial equality. When he refused to insult and attack his school's first black students in 1964, Greg was mistreated as badly as they were: harassed and bullied and beaten.