Showing results by author "Carter Blake" in All Categories

The paradise was always a sales pitch. Hawaii is one of the most visited places on Earth and one of the least honestly described. Most Americans know it through airline commercials, hotel lobbies, and textbooks that spend two paragraphs on the overthrow of a sovereign nation before moving on to something more comfortable. This book is not interested in comfortable.

Kentucky has been explained to death. It has been flattened into a punchline, romanticized into a symbol, and studied into abstraction. None of it has worked, because none of it has taken the place seriously on its own terms. This book does.

Welcome to Florida, the only state that could turn a swamp into a spectacle and a scandal into a tourist attraction. From conquistadors chasing myths to retirees chasing golf balls, Sunburns, Scandals, and Swamp Things tells the story of America’s strangest state with humor, heart, and just enough truth to sting. Historian and essayist Jordan Blake Carter takes listeners on a wild ride through five centuries of chaos and charisma, uncovering the patterns that make Florida both paradise and punchline.

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.

It's been almost a year since I've seen her, the only woman that's ever gotten under my skin, and made me wish I was a better man. More than just the washed up hockey player, turned sports journalist whose body is almost as scarred as his soul. Now, she's pregnant with my brother's baby. A baby he wants nothing to do with. And he's asked me to clean up his mess. I have no intention of offering her the deal he's laid out. I have a deal of my own. One that will finally make her mine.

Too high, too proud, too wild, too sure it has life figured out. From gold-rush fever and silver-boom scandals to ski-town glamour and wildfire panic, High, Holy, and Half-Crazy: An Irreverent History of Colorado takes you on a fast, funny, and unfiltered tour through the Centennial State’s most spectacular contradictions.

Pennsylvania is the state that built America while grumbling the entire time. This rollicking, sharply funny history traces its journey from Penn’s peaceful “holy experiment” to the roaring furnaces of the Industrial Revolution, from whiskey rebels to steel barons, from Amish buggies to AI labs, and from political meltdowns to nuclear ones.

Rhode Island is easy to forget. People confuse it with Long Island, assume it is part of Massachusetts, or wonder why a place so small gets to be a state at all. But underestimate the Ocean State at your peril. For nearly four hundred years, Rhode Island has been punching above its weight, burning ships, brawling over chowder, electing mobbed-up mayors, and yelling at its neighbors just to make sure it gets noticed.

Kansas is not the quiet heartland you learned about in school. It is the crossroads where every national argument, natural disaster, and ambitious dream once stopped for a drink. In Sunflowers, Storms, and Stubborn Souls, Jordan Blake Carter tells the history of Kansas the way it deserves to be told. Bold. Funny. Honest. And completely unfiltered. This book takes you from the ancient tallgrass prairie to the chaos of the territorial era, when Kansas held a full rehearsal for the Civil War.

Every empire has its capital. Ours happens to be built on a swamp. In Swamp, Suits, and Shenanigans, cultural essayist Jordan Blake Carter digs through two centuries of ambition, hypocrisy, and hope to reveal the real Washington, D.C. From its mosquito-ridden origins to its modern brunch-and-barricade reality, this is the capital as you have never seen it: brilliant, broken, and always under renovation.

California is the land of impossible dreams and inevitable disasters. Gold built it, earthquakes shook it, fires torched it, Hollywood sold it, and Silicon Valley convinced us all to scroll through it. Behind the sunshine and palm trees lies a history of robber barons, cult leaders, political circus acts, and enough contradictions to power the state grid.

Delaware: the First State, the Forgotten State, and the strangest little powerhouse you never paid attention to. This is not your high school history textbook. From Lenape fishing villages to Dutch and Swedish turf wars, from Caesar Rodney’s wheezing midnight ride to the explosive rise of DuPont, Delaware has been shaping America while pretending to be invisible. Along the way it perfected the art of being indispensable without being noticed: chickens, chemicals, corporations, and boardwalks all rolled into one.

New Mexico has always lived between extremes. It is ancient and futuristic, sacred and absurd, breathtaking and infuriating, a place where thousand-year-old pueblos sit down the highway from a spaceport, where UFO museums coexist with world-class art, and where chile is a state religion. Enchantment and Exasperation is a romp through thousands of years of survival, reinvention, rebellion, and weirdness.

Illinois never waited to be admired. It made itself necessary. This book tells the story of a state that learned early how to move things, reroute systems, and survive contradiction without apology. Illinois didn’t rise on speeches or symbolism. It rose on rivers, railroads, deals, and decisions that kept everything else running. Illinois: Prairie, Power, and the Audacity to Reverse a River is an unsentimental history of power built through connection, adaptation, and stubborn refusal to collapse.

Lakes, Labor, and Long Memory traces the real history beneath the politeness, from Indigenous governance and broken treaties to logging camps, iron mines, labor movements, cities shaped by paperwork, and a political culture built on memory rather than myth. This is not a brochure and it is not an apology. It is an irreverent, unsentimental look at how people in Minnesota learned to survive through cooperation, argue without disengaging, and build systems because isolation failed them again and again. Niceness here was never softness. It was strategy.

From the outside, it looks easy to explain. Rain. Trees. Coffee. A few volcanoes. People in fleece jackets who pretend they are not staring at the mountains even though they absolutely are. But that version of Washington leaves out nearly everything that matters. This is a history of a place built on contradiction. Rain forests and deserts. Ports and wheat fields. Counterculture coffee shops and irrigation canals. Fierce environmental protection alongside relentless industrial ambition. A state that argues constantly with itself and somehow survives stronger for it.

Georgia has always been the South’s wild card. It built empires from cotton, birthed legends of justice, produced presidents, shaped hip hop, hosted the world, and flipped national elections when no one was looking. But beneath the peaches and pageantry lies a history of resistance, reinvention, and relentless contradiction.

A pigeon with a shattered leg who saved two hundred soldiers. A sled dog who ran through Arctic storms to deliver life-saving medicine. A stray from Moscow who became the first living creature in space. Throughout history, animals have done far more than stand in the background. They’ve carried messages through battlefields, hauled explorers across frozen wilderness, rescued the lost, and even helped unlock the secrets of science. Some were celebrated with medals and monuments. Others faded into obscurity, their courage nearly forgotten.

When wealthy heiress Victoria Glass vanishes without a trace, seasoned detective Miles Harper expects another ordinary missing-person case. But the deeper he digs, the more the city itself seems to watch him.

America tells itself it was born in freedom and perfected through progress. The truth is harder to look at. For more than two hundred years, the government has used its own armies and laws to control the very people it claims to protect, from the soldiers who crushed the Whiskey Rebellion to the police who fired on students at Kent State. Friendly Fire is a fearless and often darkly funny exploration of how power in America defends itself.