Showing titles in State & Local

Once America's "arsenal of democracy," Detroit is now the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of America's racial and economic inequalities, Thomas Sugrue asks why Detroit and other industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty. He challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decline is the product of the social programs and racial fissures of the 1960s.

Today, Germantown is a busy neighborhood in Philadelphia. On October 4, 1777, it was a small village on the outskirts of the colonial capital whose surrounding fields and streets witnessed one of the largest battles of the American Revolution. The bloody battle represented George Washington's attempt to recapture Philadelphia but has long been overshadowed by better-known events like Brandywine, Saratoga, and Valley Forge.

The regiment’s career commenced with an ignominious defeat in its initial engagement on the South Carolina coast at Port Royal Sound in 1861. This demoralizing event could have set the regiment on a trajectory of self-fulfilling failure and catastrophe.

If you think the wildest, wackiest stories that Carl Hiaasen can tell have all made it into his hilarious, bestselling novels, think again. Dance of the Reptiles collects the best of Hiaasen’s Miami Herald columns, which lay bare the stories—large and small—that demonstrate anew that truth is far stranger than fiction.

On August 5, 1949, a crew of 15 of the United States Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of these men were dead or mortally burned. Haunted by these deaths for 40 years, Norman Maclean puts back together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy.

The story of Stax Records unfolds like a Greek tragedy. A white brother and sister build a record company that becomes a monument to racial harmony in 1960’s segregated south Memphis. Their success is startling, and Stax soon defines an international sound. Then, after losses both business and personal, the siblings part, and the brother allies with a visionary African-American partner. Under integrated leadership, Stax explodes as a national player until, Icarus-like, they fall from great heights to a tragic demise.

How did Davy Crockett save President Jackson's life only to end up dying at the Alamo? Was the Lone Ranger based on a real lawman-and was he an African American? What amazing detective work led to the capture of Black Bart, the "gentleman bandit" and one of the west's most famous stagecoach robbers? Did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid really die in a hail of bullets in South America? Generations of Americans have grown up on TV shows, movies and books about these western icons. But what really happened in the Wild West? All the stories you think you know, and others that will astonish you, are here--some heroic, some brutal and bloody, all riveting. Included are the ten legends featured in Bill O'Reilly's Legends and Lies docuseries -from Kit Carson to Jesse James, Wild Bill Hickok to Doc Holliday-- accompanied by two bonus chapters on Daniel Boone and Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley.

Drawing on first-person interviews, unpublished memoirs, newspaper accounts, contemporary studies, government documents, and recent scholarship, Sin, Sex & Subversion argues that "deviant" sexuality was subversive, and that unique New York "outsiders" of the 1950s set the stage for the following decades and the world we know today. In each chapter, author David Rosen examines a critical moral issue through an in-depth profile of figures such as Liberace, Samuel Roth, Bettie Page, the Rosenbergs, and others.

Famous games and players have been the hallmark of the New York Rangers from their NHL debut in 1926 to the present day. From Frank Boucher and the original Blueshirts to Jaromir Jagr, the Rangers have thrilled their fans with some of the most memorable performances in hockey history. In Game of My Life: New York Rangers, John Halligan and John Kreiser share the recollections of 24 of the most famous names in Rangers history as they discuss the most memorable games in their careers.

From across the sea, they came by the thousands, escaping war and poverty in southern China to seek their fortunes in America. Converging on the enormous western worksite of the Transcontinental Railroad, the migrants spent years dynamiting tunnels through the snow-packed cliffs of the Sierra Nevada and laying tracks across the burning Utah desert. Their sweat and blood fueled the ascent of an interlinked, industrial United States. But those of them who survived this perilous effort would be pushed to the margins of American life and then to the fringes of public memory.

Smart, hilarious, and incisive, the Liberal Rednecks confront outdated traditions and intolerant attitudes, tackling everything people think they know about the South - the good, the bad, the glorious, and the shameful - in a laugh-out-loud funny and lively manifesto for the rise of a New South. Home to some of the best music, athletes, soldiers, whiskey, waffles, and weather the country has to offer, the South has also been bathing in backward bathroom bills and other bigoted legislation.

Gosnell is the untold story of America's most prolific serial killer. In 2013, Dr. Kermit Gosnell was convicted of killing four people, including three babies, but is thought to have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands more in a 30-year killing spree. ABC News correspondent Terry Moran described Gosnell as "America's most prolific serial killer".

In The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington write a true story of Southern Gothic horror - of two innocent men wrongly convicted of vicious crimes and the legally condoned failures that allowed it to happen. Balko and Carrington will shine a light on the institutional and professional failures that allowed this tragic, astonishing story to happen, identify where it may have happened elsewhere, and show how to prevent it from happening again.

Here is one of the most extraordinary and invaluable documents in the annals of Native American history: the authentic testament of a remarkable "war shaman" who, for several years, held off both Mexico and the United States in fierce defense of Apache lands. During 1905 and 1906, Geronimo, the legendary Apache warrior and honorary war chief, dictated his story through a native interpreter to S. M. Barrett.

In the summer of 1967, 19-year-old Brenda Joyce Holland disappeared. She was a mountain girl who had come to Manteo to work in the outdoor drama The Lost Colony. Her body was found five days later, floating in the sound. This riveting narrative, built on unique access to the state investigative file and multiple interviews with insiders, searches for the truth of her unsolved murder. This island odyssey of discovery includes seances, a suicide, and a supposed shallow grave. Journalist John Railey cuts through the myths and mistakes to finally arrive at the long-hidden truth.

Born around 1824 in New Jersey, John Johnston headed west after deserting from the US Navy and became a well-known and infamous mountain man. His many lives would involve him working as a miner, hunter, trapper, bootlegger, woodcutter, and army scout. When his Flathead Indian wife and child were killed by Crow Indians while he was away hunting and trapping, he swore to avenge their deaths, becoming known as “Crow Killer” and “Liver-Eating Johnson” (without the “t”), names he earned by cutting out and eating the livers of his enemies.

Distinguished historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough tells one of the greatest American stories in this stirring audio adaptation of Truman - a compelling, classic portrait of a life that shaped history.

Why did southern white evangelical Christians resist the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s? Simply put, they believed the Bible told them so. These white Christians entered the battle certain that God was on their side. Focusing on the case of South Carolina, The Bible Told Them So shows how, despite suffering defeat in the public sphere with the triumph of the civil rights movement, white evangelicals continued to battle for their own institutions, preaching and practicing a segregationist Christianity they continued to believe reflected God's will.

Filled with bitter quarrels, reckless affairs, treacherous betrayals, relentless mercenaries, and courageous detectives, The Feud is the riveting story of two frontier families struggling for survival within the narrow confines of an unforgiving land. It is a formative American tale, and in it, we see the reflection of our own family bonds and the lengths to which we might go in order to defend our honor, our loyalties, and our livelihood.

A haunting dream that will not relent pulls author Kent Nerburn back into the hidden world of Native America, where dreams have meaning, animals are teachers, and the "old ones" still have powers beyond our understanding. In this moving narrative, we travel through the lands of the Lakota and the Ojibwe, where we encounter a strange little girl with an unnerving connection to the past, a forgotten asylum that history has tried to hide, and complex, unforgettable characters.