Showing titles in State & Local

In this exceptional cultural history, Atlantic Senior Editor Ronald Brownstein—“one of America's best political journalists (The Economist)—tells the kaleidoscopic story of one monumental year that marked the city of Los Angeles’ creative peak, a glittering moment when popular culture...

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the 20th century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage.

Finalist for the 2022 Will Rogers Medallion Award “Terrific.” –Timothy Egan, The New York Times “A riveting investigation of both American myth-making and the real history that lies beneath.” –Claudio Saunt, author of Unworthy Republic From the New York Times bestselling author of...

Uncover the blood-soaked secrets lurking in Louisiana's shadowy past. Deep in the mist-shrouded bayous and behind the wrought-iron balconies of New Orleans' French Quarter, darker truths have always thrived alongside the revelry. Blood in the Bayou takes listeners on a chilling journey through centuries of documented vampire encounters, unexplained deaths, and supernatural phenomena that have haunted Louisiana since colonial times.

When police raided the Short Creek compound of the Fundamental Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in 1953, it soon became a political and publicity nightmare and eventually cost the governor of Arizona his job. From that point on, skittish public officials allowed the polygamist sect to practice its tenants unmolested for the next 50 years and turned a blind eye to child abandonment, kidnapping, statutory rape, incest, and massive tax and welfare fraud. But then Warren Jeffs, a new FLDS prophet, escalated the sect’s crimes to near madness.

Perched on the bluffs of the Missouri River, Kansas City began as a crossroads of trails and trade. It endured the turmoil of the Civil War, rose to prominence through railroads and stockyards, and flourished as immigrant communities shaped its cultural mosaic. The Jazz Age gave the city a sound that echoed across the nation, even as Tom Pendergast’s political machine cast long shadows. Baseball and barbecue became traditions that defined its flavor and spirit, while the struggle for civil rights forced the city to confront its conscience and embrace change.

John Wesley Hardin! His name spread terror in much of Texas in the years following the Civil War as the most wanted fugitive, with a $4,000 reward on his head. A Texas Ranger wrote that he killed men just to see them kick. Hardin began his killing career in the late 1860s and remained a wanted man until his capture in 1877 by Texas Rangers and Florida law officials. He certainly killed 20 men; some credited him with killing 40 or more.

In this thrilling story of intellectual and archaeological discovery, David Roberts recounts his last 20 years of far-flung exploits in search of spectacular prehistoric ruins and rock art panels known to very few modern travelers. His adventures range across Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado, and illuminate the mysteries of the Ancestral Puebloans and their contemporary neighbors the Mogollon and Fremont, as well as of the more recent Navajo and Comanche.

Fort Worth has been called The City Where the West Begins, Cowtown, and the silent partner in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. None of these descriptions quite tells the story of this city and its people. Since its founding in the mid nineteenth-century as a military outpost, Fort Worth has gone through many phases - cattle, oil, aviation, and tourist. The little village on the Trinity has grown up to become a global city that is a melting pot of economic forces and diverse cultures.

The Conquest of Texas is the story of the struggle between Anglos and Indians for land. Anderson tells how Scotch-Irish settlers clashed with farming tribes and then challenged the Comanches and Kiowas for their hunting grounds. Next, the decade-long conflict with Mexico merged with war against Indians. For fifty years Texas remained in a virtual state of war. Piercing the very heart of Lone Star mythology, Anderson tells how the Texas government encouraged the Texas Rangers to annihilate Indian villages, including women and children. This policy of terror succeeded.

A sweeping cultural history of two iconic landmarks that reflect the spirit, character, and values of the US—the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty—and the role they play in shaping American culture, US history, and international relations In Empire and Liberty, historian Dr...

Like any tapestry, the threads of history cross over and under each other in different points of view and places in time. Award-winning author Deborah K. Frontiera mixes natural science and geology into history where those aspects intersect with the lives of people or are the reason Michigan's Upper Peninsula developed the way it did.

Las Vegas really is unique in so many ways. One of them is that its history, which is short but intense, can be told through the birth and demise of the resorts that dot the Strip, the rise and fall of its casino industry titans. This brief history of the Las Vegas Strip presents every casino hotel built along Las Vegas Boulevard South, the most celebrated and most visited stretch of asphalt on Earth, starting in 1941 with the El Rancho Vegas.

In his 1967 megahit "San Francisco," Scott McKenzie sang of "people in motion" coming from all across the country to San Francisco, the white-hot center of rock music and anti-war protests. At the same time, another large group of young Americans was also in motion, less eagerly, heading for the jungles of Vietnam.

During the late 1950s through the early 1970s, Helen Hoover's stories and essays of life in the wilderness on northern Minnesota's Gunflint Lake, published in popular magazines and several bestselling books, found millions of fans and earned her accolades. Hoover's own unlikely history of...

The #1 New York Times bestselling authors of The Heart of Everything That Is return with “a thorough, nuanced, and enthralling account” (The Wall Street Journal) about one of the most inspiring—and underappreciated—chapters in the American Revolution: the Continental Army’s six-month...

Where Trump Learned to Rule To know Donald J. Trump—to understand what makes the forty-fifth president of the United States tick—it is best to start in his natural habitat: Palm Beach, Florida. It is here he learned the techniques that took him all the way to the White House. Painstakingly...

Evil has a way of finding itself. How else could you explain the bond between Alvin and Judith Ann Neelley, who consecrated their marriage in blood? Before the killings started, they restricted themselves to simple mischief: prank calls, vandalism, firing guns at strangers' houses. Gradually their ambition grew, until one day at the Riverbend Mall in Rome, Georgia, they spotted Lisa Ann Millican.

Was it because they were subconsciously trying to kill the drunken, violent man that was their father that brothers Luke Karamazov and Tommy Searl from Kalamazoo became serial murderers? Addressing this and other questions, author Conrad Hilberry presents an unusually vivid and detailed portrait of two contrasting psychological types in this account. In 1964, Luke confessed to a five-week murder spree in which he killed five men. Tommy was convicted of the rape and murder of four women in 1972.

An “impassioned tribute” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) to the most influential music culture today, Atlanta rap—a masterful, street-level story of art, money, race, class, and salvation from acclaimed New York Times reporter Joe Coscarelli. From mansions to trap houses, office...