Town Histories

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.

1918. The Great War is over, and Clara Carter has boarded a train bound for Cornwall - to meet a family that would once have been hers. But they must never discover her secret... 2020. Caroline has spent years trying to uncover the lies buried in her family history. And once she arrives in Cornwall, the truth finally seems to be in reach. Except with storm clouds gathering on the horizon, Caroline soon learns that some secrets are best left hidden....

In the summer of 1860, more than 50 years after the United States legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Africans deported to the United States as slaves. This book reconstructs the lives of the people in West Africa, recounts their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describes their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women.

Beside the Troubled Waters is a memoir by an African-American physician in Alabama whose story in many ways typifies the lives and careers of Black doctors in the south during the segregationist era while also illustrating the diversity of the Black experience in the medical profession.

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.

CAPE TOWN’S POPULAR high-end night spots attract an array of clientele, from young partygoers to politicians, models to moguls. In parallel with this is a sleazy underworld where control of the lucrative nightclub-security scene is the ultimate prize, for which some are prepared to pay using extortion and murder as the main currencies. South Africa’s private-security sector is massive, an informal police force increasingly relied on as confidence in traditional policing wanes. But it’s an industry tainted by ties to underworld figures and events.

After covering racial unrest in the remote northwest corner of his home state of Nebraska in 1999, journalist Stew Magnuson returned four years later to consider the larger questions of its peoples, their paths, and the forces that separate them. Examining Raymond Yellow Thunder’s death at the hands of four White men in 1972, Magnuson looks deep into the past that gave rise to the tragedy. Situating long-ranging repercussions within 130 years of context, he also recounts the largely forgotten struggles of American Indian Movement activist Bob Yellow Bird.

When a black man was accused of attacking a white woman in a rural Florida town, a tinderbox of racial hatred was ignited. On New Year's Day 1923, Rosewood, a town of hard-working, middle-class African Americans, was burned to the ground by an angry mob of whites. After hiding in frigid nearby swamps for days, the few survivors never returned.

Throughout Teller County, history lovers can find abandoned towns and forgotten main streets that once bustled with life and commerce. Even before Teller was carved from surrounding counties, the scenic mountains and lucrative mines of the gold rush era brought thousands of settlers and attracted resort owners and tycoons eager to exploit the rich setting. Seemingly overnight, towns in the Cripple Creek District and other places popped up, flush with gold and people looking for opportunity. As the ore disappeared, the miners moved on in search of the next big lode.

In the rip-roaring, true saga of the Comstock Lode, Dennis Drabelle skillfully brings to life silver-mining in the late-nineteenth-century American West. The immense wealth extracted from the Lode spurred the growth of San Francisco, and Virginia City, the hell-raising town that sprang up above the mines, was the inspiration for the TV series Bonanza.

The last thing Harry Dit Sims expects when Emma Walker comes to town is to become friends. Proper -talking, brainy Emma doesnt play baseball or fi sh too well, but she sure makes Dit think, especially about the differences between black and white. But soon Dit is thinking about a whole lot more when the town barber, who is black, is put on trial for a terrible crime. Together Dit and Emma come up with a daring plan to save him from the unthinkable.

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.

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.

Twelve-year-old Samuel Collier is a lowly commoner on the streets of London. So when he becomes the page of Captain John Smith and boards the Susan Constant, bound for the New World, he can’t believe his good fortune. He’s heard that gold washes ashore with every tide. But beginning with the stormy journey and his first contact with the native people, he realizes that the New World is nothing like he imagined. The lush Virginia shore where they establish the colony of James Town is both beautiful and forbidding, and it’s hard to know who’s a friend or foe.

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.

Does any other single word in any language invoke so much passion, and angst, enthusiasm, and sadness, as do those 10 letters? But what is Gettysburg, exactly? I am almost embarrassed to say I discovered the answer to that question - or at least approached an answer - only late in life. Of course, Gettysburg is a small charming city nestled in south-central Pennsylvania, but in so many ways it beggars description. For about half the year its streets are mainly empty, its businesses quiet, the weather cold and blustery.

"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.

North Georgia has more than forty lakes, and not one is natural. The state's controversial decision to dam the region's rivers for power and water supply changed the landscape forever.