Showing results by publisher "Tantor Media" in State & Local

The North, Middle, and South Forks of the Flathead River drain some of the wildest country in Montana, including Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex. In Rangers, Trappers, and Trailblazers, John Fraley recounts the true adventures of people who earned their living among the mountains and along the cold, clear rivers in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Nearly two decades after it closed, the South Carolina State Hospital continues to hold a palpable mystique in Columbia and throughout the state. Founded in 1821 as the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum, it housed, fed, and treated thousands of patients incapable of surviving on their own. The patient population in 1961 eclipsed 6,600, well above its listed capacity of 4,823. By the mid-1990s, the patient population had fallen under 700, and the hospital had become a symbol of captivity, horror, and chaos.

Why is it so much easier for the Democratic Party to win the national popular vote than to build and maintain a majority in Congress? Why can Democrats sweep statewide offices in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan yet fail to take control of the same states' legislatures? Many place exclusive blame on partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression. But as political scientist Jonathan A. Rodden demonstrates in Why Cities Lose, the left's electoral challenges have deeper roots in economic and political geography.

Edward Zane Carroll Judson aka Ned Buntline (1821-1886) was responsible for creating a highly romantic and often misleading image of the American West, albeit one that the masses found irresistible in the mid-to-late 19th century. Some scholars estimate that he wrote at least 400 dime novels over his lifetime and perhaps as many as 600. The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline is an open-eyed look at the man who sparked an American legend but whose own scandalous life somehow escaped history's limelight.

Recent scholarship has explored the lives of enslaved people beyond the watchful eye of their masters. Building on this work and the study of space, social relations, gender, and power in the Old South, Stephanie Camp examines the everyday containment and movement of enslaved men and women. In her investigation of the movement of bodies, objects, and information, Camp extends our recognition of slave resistance into new arenas and reveals an important and hidden culture of opposition.

This book examines the complexities of life for African Americans in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. Although the Valley was a site of fierce conflicts during the Civil War and its military activity has been extensively studied, scholars have largely ignored the Black experience in the region until now.

Francis J. Bremer focuses on the role of religion in the settlement of the Plymouth Colony and how those values influenced political, intellectual, and cultural aspects of New England life 150 years before the American Revolution. He traces the Puritans' persecution in early 17th-century England for challenging the established national church and the difficulties they faced as refugees in the Netherlands in the 1610s.

Even without the right to vote, members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy proved to have enormous social and political influence throughout the South - all in the name of preserving Confederate culture. Karen L. Cox's history of the UDC, an organization founded in 1894 to vindicate the Confederate generation and honor the Lost Cause, shows why myths surrounding the Confederacy continue to endure.

Florida has long beckoned retirees seeking to spend their golden years in the sun, but, for many, the American dream of owning a home there was financially impossible. That changed in the 1950s, when the so-called "installment land sales industry" appeared out of nowhere to hawk billions of dollars of Florida residential property, sight unseen, to retiring northerners. For only $10 down and $10 a month, working-class pensioners could buy a piece of the Florida dream: a graded homesite that would be waiting for them in a planned community when they were ready to build.

Author John F. Wasik tracks Lincoln from his time in the 1830s as a young Illinois state legislator pushing for internal improvements; through his work as a lawyer representing the Illinois Central Railroad in the 1840s; to his presidential fight for the Transcontinental Railroad; and his support of land-grant colleges that educated a nation. These brick-and-mortar developments were essential to how the nation could lift citizens above poverty and its isolating origins.

Eve L. Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures - they're an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together. Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings.

On a Thursday in November of 2013, Guadalupe Morales waited anxiously with her sister-in-law and their four small children. Every Latino man who drove away from their shared apartment above a small auto repair shop that day had failed to return - arrested, one by one, by ICE agents and local police. As the two women discussed what to do next, a SWAT team clad in body armor and carrying assault rifles stormed the room. In Separated, William D. Lopez examines the lasting damage done by this daylong act of collaborative immigration enforcement in Washtenaw County, Michigan.

In 1968, during Albert Lepard's fifth escape from a life sentence at Parchman Penitentiary, he kidnapped Lovejoy Boteler, then 18 years old, from his family's farm in Grenada, Mississippi. Three decades later, still beset by half-buried memories of that time, Boteler began researching his kidnapper's nefarious, sordid life to discover how and why this terrifying abduction occurred.

Nineteen-year-old Burmah Adams, a hairdresser and former Santa Ana High School student, spent her honeymoon on a crime spree. She and her husband of less than one week, White, an ex-con, robbed at least 20 people in and around downtown L.A. at gunpoint over an eight-week period. But the worst of their crimes was the shooting of a popular elementary school teacher, Cora Withington, and a former publisher, Crombie Allen, who was teaching her how to drive his new car.

Briarcliff Mansion and the land it occupies are owned by Emory University, which refers to it as its "Briarcliff Campus." Fortune and Folly, in part, illuminates the largely lost story of how the mansion, and the entire surrounding neighborhood, got its name. But in order to understand the mansion, we have to understand the man who built it. Briarcliff Mansion once belonged to a man named Asa Candler, Jr.—also known as Buddie. The second son and namesake of Coca-Cola founder Asa Griggs Candler, Buddie was a wealthy real estate developer of great successes and greater failures.

A meticulously researched work about one of the Philadelphia suburbs' most shocking twentieth-century crimes. A gunman broke into Jack and Peggy Abt's house moments after the last family member left for the day. He took a seat in the living room and waited for eleven hours. People expect things to go bump in the night, but, in 1976, most adults never fretted a stranger would invade the sanctity of their home in the middle of the day. Six people walked through the kitchen door one by one that afternoon, all expecting nothing more than a Friday night fish fry.

In Pittsburgh, the elevation varies wildly, fluctuating 660 feet from highest to lowest points throughout the area and making it one of the hilliest cities in the United States. Throughout this unruly and physically challenging landscape, the city's first mass transportation system was built—a steadily expanding network of public stairways, locally referred to as city steps, these flights of stairs are a throwback to a very different time in history and a very different Pittsburgh.

Following the end of the Civil War, Mississippians responded to broader movements in the country, to changes in the economy, and to congressional initiatives as they worked to recover from the devastation of war and pursue new expressions of freedom. Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1862-1877 is a compelling account of how Black Mississippians embraced this freedom and how white Mississippians could not.

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.

The evening of November 17, 1978, should have been like any other for the four young crewmembers closing the Burger Chef at 5725 Crawfordsville Road in Speedway, Indiana. After serving customers and locking the doors for the night, the kids began their regular cleanup to ready the restaurant for the following day. But then something went horribly wrong. Just before midnight, someone muscled into the place, robbed the store of $581, and kidnapped the four employees.