Showing titles in State & Local

A young woman leaves a party with a wealthy US senator. The next morning her body is discovered in his car at the bottom of a pond. This is the damning true story of the death of campaign strategist Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick and of the senator - a 37-year-old Senator Ted Kennedy - who left her trapped underwater while he returned to his hotel, slept, and made phone calls to associates. Leo Damore's 1988 national best seller, originally entitled Senatorial Privilege, almost didn't make it into print after its original publisher, Random House, judged it too explosive....

From sacred Lenape lands to the shimmering skyline of One World Trade Center, A Brief History of New York City traces the epic evolution of America’s most iconic metropolis. In ten immersive chapters, author Derek Monaghan blends historical depth with cinematic storytelling to explore the city’s origins, upheavals, and reinventions. Walk the cobbled streets of New Amsterdam, stand amid the chaos of the Draft Riots, and witness the birth of punk, hip-hop, and Harlem’s cultural renaissance.

The #1 New York Times bestseller by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David McCullough rediscovers an important chapter in the American story that’s “as resonant today as ever” (The Wall Street Journal)—the settling of the Northwest Territory by courageous pioneers who overcame...

E. B. White's greatest stories, asides, essays, jokes, and tall tales about the city he arguably saw clearest, loved best, and skewered most mercilessly.

The classic, “gripping” (New York Times) history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of enslaved people Winner of the Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians Winner of the Sidney Hillman Prize “A stinging indictment of slavery...

Beginning in January 1692, Salem Village in colonial Massachusetts witnessed the largest and most lethal outbreak of witchcraft in early America. Villagers - mainly young women - suffered from unseen torments that caused them to writhe, shriek, and contort their bodies, complaining of pins stuck into their flesh and of being haunted by specters. Believing that they suffered from assaults by an invisible spirit, the community began a hunt to track down those responsible for the demonic work.

"With humor and lyrical grace," Kathleen Norris meditates on a place in the American landscape that is at once desolate and sublime, harsh, and forgiving, steeped in history and myth (San Francisco Chronicle). A combination of reporting and reflection, Dakota reminds us that wherever we go, we chart our own spiritual geography.

Published in 2000 to critical acclaim, The American West: A New Interpretive History quickly became the standard in college history courses. Now Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher offer a concise edition of their classic, freshly updated. Lauded for their lively and elegant writing, the authors provide a grand survey of the colorful history of the American West, from the first contacts between Native Americans and Europeans to the beginning of the 21st century.

On August 5, 1949, a crew of 15 of the United States Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of these men were dead or mortally burned. Haunted by these deaths for 40 years, Norman Maclean puts back together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy.

Situated in a barren desert landscape, Las Vegas exists for one reason—water. Popular as a waystation for travelers, the Las Vegas Valley attracted the attention of railroad visionaries at the end of the 19th century. After purchasing land from a local widow, the developers laid out a town in 1905. Vegas hasn’t slowed down since.

L.A. Coroner is a gripping true crime biography of Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the controversial “Coroner to the Stars,” who performed the autopsies of Marilyn Monroe, Robert F. Kennedy, Natalie Wood, and hundreds of other notable personalities. Choi, an award-winning historian and professor, deftly blends Los Angeles history, death investigation and forensic science, and Asian American history in a feat of exquisite storytelling.

Convergence is the story of Gio Messina and Delphine Moore's murders and the trial that followed, but this time told from the perspective of the prosecution. You are there to witness how a case is built, how it's brought to court, and how it unfolds when the trial starts. You see what happens when power and money try and keep the trial from starting at all. You follow the prosecution from the courtrooms of Chicago to rural Tennessee looking for new evidence to replace the evidence that's vanished.

Was Billy the Kid really shot to death by Sheriff Pat Garrett on a July night in 1881? At the midpoint of the last century, an old man comes forth seeking a pardon for crimes committed. He says that he wants to die a free man - and that he is Billy the Kid. The incident leads to this examination of new facts, new interpretations, and new contradictions. It is the story of "Brushy" Bill Roberts, a man who laid claim to a legend. Originally published in 1955 by University of New Mexico Press.

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.

Into the Wild meets Helter Skelter in this riveting true story of a modern-day homesteading family in the deepest reaches of the Alaskan wilderness – and of the chilling secrets of its maniacal, spellbinding patriarch. When Papa Pilgrim appeared in the Alaska frontier outpost of McCarthy...

Webb's classic history of the Texas Rangers has been popular ever since its first publication in 1935. This edition is a reproduction of the original Houghton Mifflin edition.

As English and German settlers migrated to Pennsylvania, they brought their beliefs in magic with them from the Old World—sometimes with dangerous consequences. In 1802, for example, an Allegheny County judge helped an accused witch escape an angry mob. But Susan Mummey was not so fortunate. In 1934, she was killed in her home by a young Schuylkill County man who was convinced that she had cursed him.

Booker T. Washington fought his way out of slavery to become an educator, statesman, political shaper, and proponent of the "do-it-yourself" idea. In his autobiography, he describes his early life as a slave on a Virginia plantation, his steady rise during the Civil War, his struggle for education, his schooling at the Hampton Institute, and his years as founder and president of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which was devoted to helping minorities learn useful, marketable skills.

Operation Greylord was the longest and most successful undercover investigation in FBI history, and the largest corruption bust ever in the US. It resulted in bribery and tax charges against 103 judges, lawyers, and other court personnel, and, eventually, more than 70 indictments. And it was led by Terrence Hake, a young assistant prosecutor in the Cook County State's Attorney's Office in Chicago, who worked undercover for nearly four years.

Since 1980, the number of people in US prisons has increased more than 450 percent. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world". Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces conjoined to produce the prison boom.