Showing titles in State & Local

Most Holocaust survivors who came to the US after WWII settled in big cities, but some chose an alternative way of life on American farms. More of these accidental farmers wound up raising chickens in southern New Jersey than anywhere else. Speaking Yiddish to Chickens is the first book to chronicle this chapter in American Jewish history when these refugees—including the author's grandparents—found an unlikely gateway to new lives in the US on poultry farms.

This short work of Wilde's was written during his two year incarceration for "gross indecency". This work is a letter which sorts out his life, and his love toward Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde wrote this as a farewell letter to Douglas.

The Debt is Due: A Calling to the PlanetHistory wasn’t written in ink; it was built on iron and bone. In the time it takes you to breathe, a debt is being held in trust for you by a silent witness that has carried humanity for five thousand years. In The Horses That Bind Us, Joshua Bettger delivers a surgical strike to the human conscience. This is not a "horse book" —it is a global manifesto and a historical reckoning.

Line Rider is the true story of the life of Joseph Harrison Pearce (1873-1958), written by his own hand. During his lifetime, the “wild west” from the storybooks still lived and breathed in one of the last places to be modernized—Arizona.

On the morning of June 1, 1921, a White mob numbering in the thousands marched across the railroad tracks dividing Black from White in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and obliterated a Black community then celebrated as one of America's most prosperous. Thirty-four square blocks of Tulsa's Greenwood community, known then as the Black Wall Street of America, were reduced to smoldering rubble.

New evidence in Dynamite Nashville uncovers the origin of an organized group of racist terrorists committing nationwide acts of violence against integration efforts in the late 1950's and early 1960s. Award winning historian Betsy Phillips not only paints a detailed picture of the social dynamic of the times, but details how a violent fringe of racists came to national prominence. In Dynamite Nashville, Phillips unmasks the KKK, reveals a racist terrorist network, names its principle leader, and shines a much needed historical spotlight on unsung civil rights hero Z. Alexander Looby.

Popular culture has taught us to picture the Old West as a land of men, whether it's the lone hero on horseback or crowds of card players in a rough-and-tumble saloon. But the taming of the frontier involved plenty of women, too - and this book tells their stories. At first, female pioneers were indeed rare - when the town of Denver was founded in 1859, there were only five women among a population of almost a thousand. But the adventurers arrived, slowly but surely. 

Under the shadow of gray clouds, three children venture into the woods, where they spot the corpse of an old man on a scaffold. Suddenly a wild figure emerges, with long fingernails and tangled hair. It is the Hattak fullih nipi foni, the bone picker, who comes to tear off rotting flesh with his fingernails. Only the Choctaws who adhere to the old ways will speak of him. The frightening bone picker is just one of many entities, scary and mysterious, who lurk behind every moment of this spine-tingling collection of Native fiction, written by award-winning Choctaw author Devon A. Mihesuah.

Blood in the Hills: A History of Violence in Appalachia provides an in-depth historical analysis of hostility in the region from the late 18th to the early 20th century. Editor Bruce E. Stewart discusses aspects of the Appalachian violence culture, examining skirmishes with the native population, conflicts resulting from the region's rapid modernization, and violence as a function of social control. The contributors also address geographical isolation and ethnicity, kinship, gender, class, and race with the purpose of shedding light on an often-stereotyped regional past.

A comprehensive history of Philadelphia from the region’s original Lenape inhabitants to the myriad of residents in the twenty-first century. In Philadelphia: A Narrative History, Paul Kahan presents a comprehensive portrait of the city, from the region’s original Lenape inhabitants to the myriad of residents in the twenty-first century. As any history of Philadelphia should, this book chronicles the people and places that make the city unique: from Independence Hall to Eastern State Penitentiary, Benjamin Franklin and Betsy Ross to Cecil B. Moore and Cherelle Parker.

Think you know everything there is to know about Disney? Think again! For the true Disney fan comes this historical tour of Walt Disney World, which highlights the best kept secrets, hidden past, and little-known “random Disney facts” with insider knowledge from former cast member and...

Eight captivating manuscripts in one audiobook: The Wild West, Billy the Kid, Buffalo Bill, Seth Bullock, Davy Crockett, Annie Oakley, Jesse James, and Geronimo. Some of the topics covered in part one of this audiobook include: What the Native Americans of the West were really like before colonization, how the Spanish were some of the first Europeans to explore the West, the seven years during which Texas was its own country, and much, much more!

Drawing on first-person interviews, unpublished memoirs, newspaper accounts, contemporary studies, government documents, and recent scholarship, Sin, Sex & Subversion argues that "deviant" sexuality was subversive, and that unique New York "outsiders" of the 1950s set the stage for the following decades and the world we know today. In each chapter, author David Rosen examines a critical moral issue through an in-depth profile of figures such as Liberace, Samuel Roth, Bettie Page, the Rosenbergs, and others.

The story of the Combahee River Raid, one of Harriet Tubman's most extraordinary accomplishments, based on original documents and written by a descendant of one of the participants: Edda L. Fields-Black shows how Tubman commanded a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots and participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black US Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up coastal South Carolina's Combahee River in three gunboats. 

In the years 1804, 1805, and 1806, two men commanded an expedition which explored the wilderness that stretched from the mouth of the Missouri River to where the Columbia enters the Pacific, and dedicated to civilization a new empire. Their names were Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. This book relates that adventure from it’s inception through its completion as well as the effect the expedition had upon the history of the United States.

Skid Road tells the story of Seattle "from the bottom up," offering an informal and engaging portrait of the Emerald City's first century, as seen through the lives of some of its most colorful citizens.

The memory of the Battle of Antietam was so haunting that when, nine months later, Major Rufus Dawes learned another Antietam battle might be on the horizon, he wrote, "I hope not, I dread the thought of the place." In this definitive account, historian D. Scott Hartwig chronicles the single bloodiest day in American history, which resulted in 23,000 casualties.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Goodreads Choice Award Winner in History & Biography One of Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2024 "A spirited defense of this important, odd and odds-defying American retail category." —The New York Times "It is a delight to wander through the bookstores of American...

For decades, the specter of homosexuality haunted Washington. The mere suggestion that a person might be gay destroyed reputations, ended careers, and ruined lives. At the height of the Cold War, fear of homosexuality became intertwined with the growing threat of international communism, leading to a purge of gay men and lesbians from the federal government. In the fevered atmosphere of political Washington, the secret “too loathsome to mention” held enormous, terrifying power.

In The Age of the Borderlands, acclaimed historian Andrew C. Isenberg offers a new history of manifest destiny that breaks from triumphalist narratives of US territorial expansion. Isenberg takes listeners to the contested borders of Spanish Florida, Missouri, New Mexico, California, Texas, and Minnesota at critical moments in the early to mid-nineteenth century, demonstrating that the architects of American expansion faced significant challenges from the diverse groups of people inhabiting each region.