Showing titles in State & Local

From ancient Tongva lands to the global stage of the Olympics and Silicon Beach, A Brief History of Los Angeles offers a vivid, cinematic journey through the evolution of one of the world’s most complex cities. Author Derek Monaghan blends historical clarity with emotional resonance, tracing LA’s transformation across ten immersive chapters. Explore the city’s Indigenous roots, Spanish colonization, and Mexican ranchos. Witness the rise of oil empires, the engineering of water, and the birth of Hollywood’s dream factory.

A magisterial dual biography of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, the two most legendary and consequential American Indian leaders, who triumphed at the Battle of Little Bighorn and led Sioux resistance in the fierce final chapter of the "Indian Wars." Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull: Their names are...

In the years 1804, 1805, and 1806, two men commanded an expedition which explored the wilderness that stretched from the mouth of the Missouri River to where the Columbia enters the Pacific, and dedicated to civilization a new empire. Their names were Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. This book relates that adventure from it’s inception through its completion as well as the effect the expedition had upon the history of the United States.

For more than a century, the city of Atlanta has been associated with Black achievement in education, business, politics, media, and music, earning it the nickname "the Black Mecca." Atlanta's long tradition of Black education dates back to Reconstruction, and produced an elite that flourished in spite of Jim Crow, rose to leadership during the civil rights movement, and then took power in the 1970s by building a coalition between White progressives, business interests, and Black Atlantans. But Atlanta's political leadership has consistently mishandled the Black poor.

Two political titans forge a modern city and a vibrant public sector in this history of strong leadership at a time of national crisis. City of Ambition is a brilliant history of the New Deal and its role in the making of modern New York City. The story of a remarkable collaboration between Franklin Roosevelt and Fiorello La Guardia, this is a case study in creative political leadership in the midst of a devastating depression.

In 2015 and 2016, Baltimore was reeling after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody and the protests that followed. In the midst of this unrest, the Baltimore Police Department's Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) roamed the city, robbing people, selling drugs and guns back onto the same streets they were supposed to be policing, and dividing the loot and profit among themselves. Created to trace guns back to the criminals responsible for Baltimore's high crime rates, instead, on March 1, 2017, all members of the GTTF were arrested on federal racketeering charges.

Antebellum New Orleans sat at the heart of America's slave and cotton kingdoms. It was also where yellow fever epidemics killed as many as 150,000 people during the nineteenth century. With little understanding of mosquito-borne viruses, a person's only protection against the scourge was to "get acclimated" by surviving the disease. Repeated epidemics bolstered New Orleans's strict racial hierarchy by introducing another hierarchy, what Kathryn Olivarius terms "immunocapital." Whereas immunity conferred privilege on whites, it relegated enslaved people to the most grueling labor.

Ossman & Steel's Guide to Health or Household Instructor (its original title) is a collection of spells, remedies, and charms. The book draws from the old Pennsylvania Dutch and German powwow healing practices that in turn helped shape Appalachian folk healing, conjure, root work, and many folk healing traditions in America. Jake Richards, author of Backwoods Witchcraft and Doctoring the Devil, puts these remedies in context, with practical advice for modern-day "backwoods" healers interested in using them today.

The Crack Era: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of Kevin Chiles chronicles one of the most treacherous periods in New York City’s history. As told by a man The New York Times once described as, “the biggest drug lord in Harlem since Nicky Barnes”, the book lays bare the harrowing exploits of the narcotics trade Uptown during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s - a world where the lust for freebase cocaine set off a veritable gold rush that turned ghetto boys into young millionaires almost overnight.

In the spring of 1864, the newly installed Union commander Ulysses S. Grant did something none of his predecessors had done before: He threw his army against the wily, audacious Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia over and over again. At Spotsylvania Court House, the two armies shifted from stalemate in the Wilderness to slugfest in the mud. Most commonly known for the horrific 22-hour hand-to-hand combat in the pouring rain at the Bloody Angle, the battle of Spotsylvania Court House actually stretched from May 8 to 21, 1864 - 14 long days of battle and maneuver.

The SS Portland was a solid and luxurious ship, and its loss in 1898 in a violent storm with some 200 people aboard was later remembered as “New England’s Titanic.” The Portland was one of New England's largest and most luxurious paddle steamers, and after nine years' solid performance, she had earned a reputation as a safe and dependable vessel. In November 1898, a perfect storm formed off the New England coast. Conditions would produce a blizzard with 100 miles per hour winds and 60-foot waves that pummeled the coast.

When Union and Confederate forces squared off along Bull Run on July 21, 1861, the Federals expected this first major military campaign would bring an early end to the Civil War. But when Confederate troops launched a strong counterattack, both sides realized the war would be longer and costlier than anticipated. First Bull Run, or First Manassas, set the stage for four years of bloody conflict that forever changed the political, social, and economic fabric of the nation. It also introduced the commanders, tactics, and weaponry that would define the American way of war through the turn of the twentieth century.

On to Petersburg follows the Union army's movement to the James River, the military response from the Confederates, and the initial assault on Petersburg, which Rhea suggests marked the true end of the Overland Campaign. Beginning his account in the immediate aftermath of Grant's three-day attack on Confederate troops at Cold Harbor, Rhea argues that the Union general's primary goal was not - as often supposed - to take Richmond, but rather to destroy Lee's army by closing off its retreat routes and disrupting its supply chain.

Winner of the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Nonfiction The little-known but uniquely American story of the unlikely friendship of two famous figures of the American West—Buffalo Bill Cody and Sitting Bull—told through the prism of their collaboration in Cody's Wild West show in 1885...

Granny Clampett, on the TV sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies, described the War Between the States as "when the Yankees invaded America" and, indeed, it was! Their invasion of America, however, goes back much farther than the conflict of 1861-1865. It began as soon as they dropped their anchor in Plymouth Bay. Since that time, they have meddled, cheated, and lied their way into every nook and cranny of American life.

John Harris Rogers (1863?1930) served in Texas law enforcement for more than four decades, as a Texas Ranger, Deputy and U.S. Marshal, city police chief, and in the private sector as a security agent. He is recognized in history as one of the legendary "Four Captains" of the Ranger force that helped make the transition from the Frontier Battalion days into the 20th century, yet no one has fully researched and written about his life. Paul N. Spellman now presents the first full-length biography of this enigmatic man.

Following the Civil War, Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, thrived as a cauldron of sex and song, violence and passion. But out of this turmoil emerged a center of black progress, optimism, and cultural ferment. Preston Lauterbach tells this vivid, fascinating story through the multigenerational saga of a family whose ambition, race pride, and moral complexity indelibly shaped the city that would loom so large in American life.

In February 1864, 500 Union prisoners of war arrived at the Confederate stockade at Anderson Station, Georgia. Andersonville, as it was later known, would become legendary for its brutality and mistreatment, with the highest mortality rate--more than 30 percent--of any Civil War prison. Fourteen months later 32,000 men were imprisoned there.

The story of the American mining frontier can be traced in the ghost towns - from the camps of California's forty-niners to the 20th-century ruins in the Nevada desert. They mark an epoch of high adventure, of quick wealth and quicker poverty, of gambling and gun-slinging and hell-raising. We who have seen too many Western movies sometimes think that the legends of the Wild West were invented by scriptwriters - but the ghost towns remain.

The gripping story of 200 freed Mississippi slaves who sailed to Liberia to build a new colony - where the colonists' repression of the native tribes would beget a tragic cycle of violence. When a wealthy Mississippi cotton planter named Isaac Ross died in 1836, his will decreed that his plantation, Prospect Hill, should be liquidated and the proceeds from the sale be used to pay for his slaves' passage to the newly established colony of Liberia in western Africa.