Showing results for "Hero" in State & Local

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Michael Benfante went to work, just like he had day after day, at his office on 81st floor in the World Trade Center North Tower. Moments after the first plane struck, just 12 floors above him, Benfante organized his terrified employees, getting them out of the office and moving down the stairwells. On his way down, he and another co-worker encountered a woman in a wheelchair on the 68th floor.

The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony. He escaped and six months later was heralded in the streets of New York - the revolutionary hero, back from the dead, at the dawn of the great Irish immigration to America.

The true story of Eliot Ness, the legendary lawman who led the Untouchables, took on Al Capone, and saved a city’s soul Eliot Ness is famous for leading the Untouchables against the notorious mobster Al Capone. But it turns out that the legendary Prohibition Bureau squad’s daring raids were...

A sweeping, action-packed saga of the legendary last stand at the Alamo, by the author of the bestselling A Terrible Glory. On February 23, 1836, a large Mexican army led by dictator Santa Anna reached San Antonio and laid siege to about 175 Texas rebels holed up in the Alamo. The Texans refused...

In 1895, emissaries from the New York Yacht Club traveled to Deer Isle, Maine, to recruit the nation's best sailors, an "All American" crew. This remote island in Penobscot Bay sent nearly 30 of its fishing men to sail Defender, and under skipper Hank Haff, they beat their opponents in a difficult and controversial series. To the delight of the American public, the charismatic Sir Thomas Lipton sent a surprise challenge in 1899. Listen to their fascinating story and relive their adventure.

The gritty, true blue story of two remarkable cops and an equally extraordinary nurse who provided the spirit and smarts that transformed Fear City into the safest big city in America. NEW YORK'S FINEST is the story of a city's transformation through the tireless efforts of Detective Steven...

If, as historian Thomas Carlyle said, the history of the world is but the biography of great men, then it is also true that the story of the great men is a parable of their times, places, and generational aspirations. The life of Davy Crockett, one of the most cherished and remembered American frontiersmen, is an accurate representation of the United States as it stretched westward to become one of the largest nations in the world. Yet, David Crockett was not a mythical character but a very real person.

Sickles at Gettysburg by licensed battlefield guide James Hessler, is the most deeply-researched, full-length biography to appear on this remarkable American icon. No individual who fought at Gettysburg was more controversial, both personally and professionally, than Major General Daniel E. Sickles. By 1863, Sickles was notorious as a disgraced former Congressman who murdered his wife’s lover on the streets of Washington and used America’s first temporary insanity defense to escape justice.

Who was Nede Wade Christie? Was he a violent criminal guilty of murdering a federal officer? Or a Cherokee statesman who suffered a martyr’s death for a crime he did not commit? For more than a century, journalists, pulp fiction authors, and even serious historians have produced largely fictitious accounts of “Ned” Christie’s life. Now, in a tour de force of investigative scholarship, Devon A. Mihesuah offers a far more accurate depiction of Christie and the times in which he lived.

Heroes and rascals...shipwrecks and lost gold... Since 2008, the Offbeat Oregon History syndicated newspaper column has entertained and informed Oregonians with the weirdest, quirkiest, funniest, and most outrageous true stories in the surprisingly long history of their young state. Now, for the first time, those stories have been collected together, re-researched, augmented with freshly discovered information, and presented to listeners in audiobook form.

In the winter of 1901, James W. Jarrott led a band of twenty-five homesteader families toward the Llano Estacado in far West Texas, newly opened for settlement by a populist Texas legislature. But frontier cattlemen who had been pasturing their herds on the unfenced prairie land were enraged by the encroachment of these “nesters.” In August 1902, a famous hired assassin, Jim Miller, ambushed and murdered J. W. Jarrott. Who hired Miller? This crime has never been solved, until now.

Henry Lee III - whose nickname, "Light-Horse," came from his legendary exploits with mounted troops and skill in the saddle - was a dashing cavalry commander and hero of America's War for Independence. By now most Americans have forgotten about Light-Horse Harry Lee, the father of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, but this new biography reveals he may be one of the most fascinating figures in our nation's history. A daring military commander, Lee was also an early American statesman whose passionate argument in favor of national unity helped ratify the Constitution.

In the April of 1945, exactly two years before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major-league baseball, liberal Boston City Councilman Izzy Muchnick persuaded the Red Sox to try out three Black players in return for a favorable vote to allow the team to play on Sundays. The Red Sox got the councilman’s much-needed vote, but the tryout was a sham; the three players would get no closer to the major leagues. It was a lost battle in a war that was ultimately won by Robinson in 1947. This book tells the story of the little-known heroes who fought segregation in baseball.