Showing titles in State & Local

Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” He must’ve been a Phillies fan. The Philadelphia Phillies, a franchise nearly 150 years old, has only reached its grand destination twice (World Series wins in 1980 and 2008), but it harbors the most fervent fan base in baseball. How? Well, Olive Garden famously said, “When you’re here, you’re family.” The Phillies—warts and all—have been an inextricable part of the city, and the lives of the fans who cheered them on. The team’s story is part of our story.

Mississippi is a state of contradictions. It is the birthplace of the blues and Elvis, yet also the epicenter of America’s ugliest battles over race and equality. It ranks last in nearly everything good, but first in cultural influence. Mud, Magnolias, and Mayhem: An Irreverent History of Mississippi takes you on a wild ride through the Magnolia State’s tangled past, from Civil War chaos and Jim Crow laws to tamale festivals, Elvis impersonators, and casino barges.

Arizona is not just saguaros, sunsets, and the Grand Canyon. It is Tombstone shootouts stretched into legend, UFOs drifting over Phoenix, retirees clogging the left lane in golf carts, and politicians who treat chaos as a hobby. It is Indigenous ingenuity outlasting modern sprawl, Hoover Dam holding back both water and hubris, and snowbirds insisting it’s a “dry heat” while their sneakers melt on the pavement. In Cactus, Chaos, and Contradictions, Jordan Blake Carter takes you on a sarcastic, sharp-tongued romp through the state’s weird past and wild present.

Just a year after the town of Borger, Texas, was founded, the press called it "the wickedest in the state" for good reason. The town, sprung into existence overnight to support the oilfields, had become a lawless haven for bootleggers, pimps, and gamblers, run by a crooked city hall.

In the high desert of Colorado stands the most secretive and fortified prison in the United States—a place built to contain the men deemed too dangerous for anywhere else. ADX Florence: America’s Most Secure Prison offers a rare, unflinching look inside this modern fortress of isolation. Through investigative detail and ethical inquiry, the book explores its architecture, daily operations, infamous inmates, and the legal and moral questions surrounding extreme confinement.

From the acclaimed journalist standing only a few feet away from the stage when the gunshots began is this gripping first-hand account of the near assassination of Donald Trump–and the inside story of Trump’s heartland-fueled victory.

Martha S. Jones grew up feeling her Black identity was obvious to all who saw her. But weeks into college, a Black Studies classmate challenged Jones’s right to speak. Suspicious of the color of her skin and the texture of her hair, he confronted her with a question that inspired a lifetime of introspection: “Who do you think you are?” Now a prizewinning scholar of Black history, Jones delves into her family’s past for answers. In every generation since her great-great-great-grandmother survived enslavement to raise a free family, color determined her ancestors’ lives.

In her analysis of the cultural construction of gender in early America, Elizabeth Reis explores the intersection of Puritan theology, Puritan evaluations of womanhood, and the Salem witchcraft episodes. She finds in those intersections the basis for understanding why women were accused of witchcraft more often than men, why they confessed more often, and why they frequently accused other women of being witches.

Six weeks after the United States entered World War II, Imperial Japan is annihilating American forces across the Far East while the Nazis stand triumphant over much of Europe. Adolf Hitler's forces are about to commence an assault along the East Coast of the United States, but this "Atlantic Pearl Harbor" would prove far more devastating than Japan's attack on Hawaii. The Western Hemisphere holds the key to victory, but only if the vast economic and military resources of North and South America can be carried across the Atlantic by Allied merchant ships.

As president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and Utah’s first territorial governor, Brigham Young (1801-77) shaped a religion, a migration, and the American West. He led the Saints to Utah, guided the establishment of 350 settlements, and inspired the Mormons as they weathered unimaginable trials and hardships. In this new biography, historian Thomas G. Alexander draws on a lifetime of research to provide an evenhanded view of Young and his leadership.

At the End of the Santa Fe Trail is a book by Sister Blandina Segale about her fascinating experiences as a young Catholic nun in the southwestern United States from 1872 to 1892. At a time when lawlessness and brutality were the norm, Sister Blandina displayed courage, tough-mindedness, and a deep religious faith in service to the less fortunate. Sister Blandina's well-written account tells of working with immigrants, Hispanics, and Native Americans who were losing their land to swindlers.

In Bubble in the Sun Christopher Knowlton shows us the grand artistic and entrepreneurial visions behind Coral Gables, Boca Raton, Mar-a-Lago, Miami Beach, and other storied sites. It was a time when the nightlife raged more raucously than anywhere else in America; workers, mostly black, who built and maintained the boom endured grievous abuses; and the pure beauty of the Everglades suffered wanton ruination. Knowlton also breathes dynamic life into the four forces that made and/or broke Florida in the time.

Murray Morgan's classic history of the Olympic Peninsula, originally published in 1955, evokes a remote American wilderness "as large as the state of Massachusetts, more rugged than the Rockies, its lowlands blanketed by a cool jungle of fir and pine and cedar, its peaks bearing hundreds of miles of living ice that gave rise to swift rivers alive with giant salmon."

Shocked by a five-month arson spree that left rural Virginia reeling, Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse drove down to Accomack County to cover the trial of Charlie Smith, who pled guilty to 67 counts of arson. But Charlie wasn't lighting fires alone: he had an accomplice - his girlfriend, Tonya Bundick. Through her depiction of the dangerous shift that happened in their passionate relationship, Hesse brilliantly brings to life the once-thriving coastal community and its distressed inhabitants.

On June 28, 2013, a single bolt of lightning sparked an inferno that devoured more than 8,000 acres in Northern Arizona. Twenty elite firefighters - the Granite Mountain Hotshots - walked together into the blaze, tools in their hands and fire shelters on their hips. Only one of them walked out.

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 late 1800s, the city of Austin, Texas, was on the cusp of emerging from an isolated western outpost into a truly cosmopolitan metropolis. But beginning in December 1884, Austin was terrorized by someone equally as vicious and, in some ways, far more diabolical than London's infamous Jack the Ripper. For almost exactly one year, the Midnight Assassin crisscrossed the entire city, striking on moonlit nights, using axes, knives, and long steel rods to rip apart women from every race and class.

"I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer," John Muir wrote. "Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not dimmed my glacial eye, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness. My own special self is nothing". In Donald Worster's magisterial biography, John Muir's "special self" is fully explored as is his extraordinary ability, then and now, to get others to see the sacred beauty of the natural world.

Just after midnight on October 9, 2017, as one of the nation's deadliest firestorms swept over California's Wine Country, hundreds of elderly residents from two posh senior living facilities were caught in its path. The frailest were blind, in wheelchairs, or diagnosed with dementia, and their community quickly transformed from a palatial complex that pledged to care for them to one that threatened to entomb them. The rescue of the final 105 seniors left behind on an inflamed hillside depended not on employees, but strangers whose lives intersected in a riveting tale of terror and heroism.

These are the valiant and lyrically descriptive letters, written in 1873, by Isabella Bird, a courageous and spirited Englishwoman, telling her sister of her adventures on horseback over 800 miles of American wilderness.