Showing results by narrator "Chaz Allen" in All Categories

On March 9, 1862, the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia met in the Battle of Hampton Roads—the first time ironclad vessels would engage each other in combat. For four hours the two ships pummeled one another as thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers and civilians watched from the shorelines. Although the battle ended in a draw, this engagement would change the nature of naval warfare by informing both vessel design and battle tactics.

For most of Sophia Cavello’s twenty-nine years, she has been able to see dead people. It’s the cross she must bear or as she describes her unique ability, “A circus without a ringmaster.” When Sophia meets the ghost of Enry Larsen, a movie legend who was murdered over thirty years ago, the craziness ramps up. Mayhem abounds when another murder takes place and now, both ghosts want their murders solved.

America’s Wild West created an untold number of notorious characters, and in southwestern Texas, John King Fisher (1855– 1884) was foremost among them. To friends and foes alike, he insisted he be called “King.” He found a home in the tough sun-beaten Nueces Strip, a lawless land between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. There he gathered a gang of rustlers around him at his ranch on Pendencia Creek. For a decade King and his gang raided both sides of the Rio Grande, shooting down any who opposed them.

Beautiful but troubled Irish con artist Myra Delaney is on the run in 1920s Portland, Oregon, with stolen money in her satchel and misdeeds on her mind. Fleeing an abusive marriage--and the consequences of her own crimes--Myra escapes to the captivating world of the traveling circus, with its secret lingo, exotic performers, and nightly journeys from town to town.

Edward O'Brien has loved Lydia Delaney since he was 10 years old, when he proved it by pushing her into a mud puddle. When he leaves for America in 1924 to make his fortune for their future, Lydia is heartbroken, and her ruthless younger sister, Myra, is still determined to have Edward at any cost. Edward finds life in America difficult. Immigrants, especially Irish Catholics, are shunned, and the influence of the Ku Klux Klan has spread like an epidemic throughout America.

Born in 1888 in what would soon be Oklahoma Territory, Jim Thorpe was a member of the Sac and Fox Nation. After attending the Sac and Fox agency school and Haskell Indian Junior College in Lawrence, Kansas, he transferred to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. At Carlisle he led the football team to victories over some of the nation's best college teams—Army, Navy, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Pennsylvania, and Nebraska. In 1912 he participated in the Olympic Games in Stockholm, winning both the decathlon and pentathlon.

Long before the days of jet planes, Nick Mamer and co-pilot Art Walker set an awe-inspiring record. They flew from Spokane, Washington to San Francisco, to New York, and from New York back to Spokane—without landing. This is the true story of the 1929 flight—during which their airplane was again and again refueled in the air with ropes and hose—by other daring airmen flying wood-and-fabric airplanes.