Showing titles in State & Local

Read by the author and set in one of the world’s most beautiful landscapes, Kuleana is the story of an award-winning journalist’s effort to hold on to her family’s ancestral Hawaiian lands—and find herself along the way. “A powerful story of land, belonging, loss, and survival that...

The massacre at Mountain Meadows on September 11, 1857, was the single most violent attack on a wagon train in the 30-year history of the Oregon and California trails. Yet it has been all but forgotten. Will Bagley's Blood of the Prophets is an award-winning, riveting account of the attack on the Baker-Fancher wagon train by Mormons in the local militia and a few Paiute Indians.

From its inception, Atlantic City has always been a town dedicated to the fast buck, and this wide-reachinghistory offers a riveting account of its past 100 year, from the city's heyday as a Prohibition-era mecca of lawlessness to its rebirth as a legitimate casino resort in the modern era.

Nashville - a haven for aspiring musicians and a magnet for country-music fans. By the time Pat Postiglione arrived there in 1980, it was also the scene of an unsolved series of vicious sex slayings that served as a harbinger of worse to come. As Postiglione was promoted from street-beat Metro cop to detective sergeant heading Music City’s elite cold-case Murder Squad, some of America’s most bizarre, elusive, and savage serial killers were calling Nashville home. And during the next two decades, the body count climbed.

The National Book Award–winning biography that tells the story of how young Teddy Roosevelt transformed himself from a sickly boy into the vigorous man who would become a war hero and ultimately president of the United States, told by master historian David McCullough. Mornings on Horseback is...

This epic work tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family's dispersal after Jefferson's death in 1826. It brings to life not only Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson but also their children and Hemings's siblings, who shared a father with Jefferson's wife, Martha.

Mrs. Grace Humiston was an amazing lawyer and a traveling detective during a time when no women were practicing those professions. She focused on solving cases no one else wanted and advocating for innocents. One of her greatest accomplishments was solving the cold case of a missing 18-year-old girl, Ruth Cruger. Her work changed how the country viewed the problem of missing girls, but it came with a price: she learned all too well what happens when one woman upstages the entire NYPD.

“Riveting…an electrifying true crime story of the Mafia-smitten eighties and nineties. Suspenseful and multifaceted, The Gotti Wars can’t be missed.” —Esquire, “The Best Nonfiction Books of the Year” A “meticulous chronicle of good triumphing over evil” (The Washington Post)...

Aikau's legendary life and legacy, a pipeline into the exhilarating world of surfing, and an important chronicle of the Hawaiian Renaissance and the emergence of modern Hawaii. In the 1970s, a decade before bumper stickers and T-shirts bearing the phrase Eddie Would Go began popping up all over the Hawaiian islands and throughout the surfing world, Eddie Aikau was proving what it meant to be a "waterman." 

Bonnie and Clyde were responsible for multiple murders and countless robberies. But they did not act alone. In 1933, during their infamous run from the law, Bonnie and Clyde were joined by Clyde's brother Buck Barrow and his wife Blanche. Of these four accomplices, only one, Blanche Caldwell Barrow, lived beyond early adulthood and only Blanche left behind a written account of their escapades. Edited by outlaw expert John Neal Phillips, Blanche's previously unknown memoir is here available for the first time.

In this groundbreaking work, William Cronon gives us an environmental perspective on the history of nineteenth-century America. By exploring the ecological and economic changes that made Chicago America's most dynamic city and the Great West its hinterland, Mr. Cronon opens a new window onto our national past. This is the story of city and country becoming ever more tightly bound in a system so powerful that it reshaped the American landscape and transformed American culture. The world that emerged is our own.

From the true crime author of Murderabilia, a geographic telling of some of the most notorious but lesser-known murders for each US State. Filled with hundreds of entries organized by location, 50 States of Murder is a lively and chilling work of storytelling and an authoritative survey of the...

Sanora Babb' s long-hidden novel Whose Names Are Unknown tells an intimate story of the High Plains farmers who fled drought dust storms during the Great Depression. Written with empathy for the farmers' plight, this powerful narrative is based upon the author' s firsthand experience.

A propulsive and “entertaining” (The Wall Street Journal) history chronicling the conception and creation of the iconic Disneyland theme park, as told like never before by popular historian Richard Snow. One day in the early 1950s, Walt Disney stood looking over 240 acres of farmland in...

The case began in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1922 and lasted for over a decade. The killer has never been found, and the case continues to fascinate true-crime aficianados. A bon vivant Episcopal minister, a not-so-virginal soprano in his choir. The wealthy wife. Her oddball brother. Their furtive maid. The snooping congregants. The bumbling detectives. And in the denouement, a trial, one of the more notable of America’s Jazz Age, covered by the likes of Damon Runyon, Dorothy Dix and James Thurber. All of it hanging on the dramatic testimony of a single, strange witness.

Mayhem goes a long way toward answering questions that still linger about the notorious Boston Marathon bombing, such as: Where were the bombs made? And what had been Tamerlan Tsarnaev's relationship to the FBI? This page-turning narrative casts a spotlight on the US Government's relationship...

One of the most feared Chicago mobsters, Sam Giancana, clawed his way to the top of the Mafia hierarchy by starting as a hit man for Al Capone. He was known as one of the best vehicle escape artists, a tenacious business man, and a ruthless killer. He partied with major stars such as Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe and did business with agents ranging from the CIA to the Vatican to the shah of Iran. When politician Joe Kennedy gave Giancana the chance to use mob muscle to get his son John elected, Giancana jumped at the task.

The best of this year's true crime writing from master true crime authors RJ Parker, Peter Vronsky, JJ Slate, Sylvia Perrini, and Michael Newton, who give us nine new shocking case accounts of serial killers.

Booker T. Washington fought his way out of slavery to become an educator, statesman, political shaper, and proponent of the "do-it-yourself" idea. In his autobiography, he describes his early life as a slave on a Virginia plantation, his steady rise during the Civil War, his struggle for education, his schooling at the Hampton Institute, and his years as founder and president of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which was devoted to helping minorities learn useful, marketable skills.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The true tale of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and the cunning serial killer who used the magic and majesty of the fair to lure his victims to their death. A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his...