Showing titles in State & Local

Waiting in the night, hidden behind a remote island, no lights showing, pirates would lure unsuspecting ships into unknown waters. Then they would silently slide up to them and board the ship. The crew would be killed and the bodies thrown over the side, weighted down with chains. The pirates would take the cargo, sink or burn the ship, and then, just as quietly, sail away into the night. Dead men tell no tales, nor do they testify in court.

When 1919 began, the city of Chicago seemed on the verge of transformation. Modernizers had an audacious, expensive plan to turn the city from a brawling, unglamorous place into “the Metropolis of the World.” But just as the dream seemed within reach, pandemonium broke loose and the city’s...

Read by the author and set in one of the world’s most beautiful landscapes, Kuleana is the story of an award-winning journalist’s effort to hold on to her family’s ancestral Hawaiian lands—and find herself along the way. “A powerful story of land, belonging, loss, and survival that...

The hidden history of Wall Street and the White House comes down to a single, powerful, quintessentially American concept: confidence. Both centers of power, tapping brazen innovations over the past three decades, learned how to manufacture it. Until August 2007, when that confidence finally...

From the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Strange Trip and the publicist of the Grateful Dead, a riveting social history of everything that led up to the 1960s counterculture movement. Few cities represent the countercultural movement of the 1960s more than San Francisco. By that...

1916: Norma Wallace, age 15, arrived in New Orleans. Sexy and shrewd, she quickly went from streetwalker to madam and by 1920 had opened what became a legendary house of prostitution. There she entertained a steady stream of governors, gangsters, and movie stars until she was arrested at last in 1962. Shortly before she died in 1974, she tape-recorded her memories. With those tapes and original research, Christine Wiltz chronicles Norma's rise and fall with the social history of New Orleans.

For two years, Scots-born John Muir lived in a small cabin along the Yosemite creek, observing the valley's natural beauty and reading Emerson under the stars. The experience forged a lifelong affinity with the site, which would result in its establishment as a national park in 1890. Originally written as a guidebook to the park, The Yosemite describes every aspect of wildlife and landscape that one might encounter there.

Tormented girls writhing in agony, stern judges meting out harsh verdicts, 19 bodies swinging on Gallows Hill. The stark immediacy of what happened in 1692 has obscured the complex web of human passion which climaxed in the Salem witch trials. From rich and varied sources - many neglected and unknown - Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum give us a picture of the people and events more intricate and more fascinating than any other in the massive literature. It is a story of powerful and deeply divided families and of a community determined to establish an independent identity.

In 1944, the big top of Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus in Hartford caught fire during the middle of an afternoon performance. Nine thousand people were inside. In seconds, the big top was burning out of control. The toll of the fire, and its circumstances, haunt Hartford to the present day. But it is the intense, detailed narrative - before, after, and especially during the panic under the burning tent - that will remain with listeners long after they finish this book.

The racialized and exoticized cult of Voodoo occupies a central place in the popular image of the Crescent City. But as Kodi A. Roberts argues in Voodoo and Power, the religion was not a monolithic tradition handed down from African ancestors to their American-born descendants. Instead, a much more complicated patchwork of influences created New Orleans Voodoo, allowing it to move across boundaries of race, class, and gender.

The National Book Award–winning biography that tells the story of how young Teddy Roosevelt transformed himself from a sickly boy into the vigorous man who would become a war hero and ultimately president of the United States, told by master historian David McCullough. Mornings on Horseback is...

The Great Sioux War of 1876-77 began at daybreak on March 17, 1876, when Colonel Joseph J. Reynolds and six cavalry companies struck a village of Northern Cheyennes - Sioux allies - thereby propelling the Northern Plains tribes into war. The ensuing last stand of the Sioux against Anglo-American settlement of their homeland spanned some 18 months, playing out across more than 20 battle and skirmish sites and costing hundreds of lives on both sides and many millions of dollars. And it all began at Powder River.

The author of 18 spellbinding detective novels set on the Navajo Nation, Tony Hillerman simultaneously transformed a traditional genre and unlocked the mysteries of the Navajo culture to an audience of millions. His best-selling novels added Navajo Tribal Police detectives Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee to the pantheon of American fictional detectives.  

Winner, American Battlefield Trust Prize for History Winner, Library of Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction Finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography A “compelling portrait” (Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize­–winning author) of the controversial Confederate general who later...

Bloomberg: A Billionaire's Ambition tells the story of how one of America's most successful entrepreneurs was elected mayor of New York City and what he did with the power he won. Bloomberg's stunning victory against all odds just weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attack left him facing challenges unlike any mayor in history. For the next 12 years, he kept the city safe, managed budgets through fiscal crises, promoted private sector growth, and more. But his time as mayor was not without controversy.

When Chris Bryson was discovered nude and severely beaten stumbling down Charlotte Street in Kansas City in 1988, police had no idea they were about to discover the den of one of the most sadistic American serial killers in recent history. This is the true story of Robert Berdella, nicknamed by the media the Kansas City Butcher, who from between 1984 and 1988 brutally raped, tortured, and ultimately dismembered six young male prostitutes in his unassuming home on a quiet street in Kansas City.

In the winter of 1873, a small band of prospectors lost their way in the frozen wilderness of the Colorado Rockies. Months later, when the snow finally melted, only one of them emerged. His name was Alfred G. Packer, though he would soon become infamous throughout the country under a different name: "the Man-Eater."

The gruesome murder of hopeful starlet Elizabeth Short, in the noir-tinged Los Angeles of 1947, has a permanent place in American lore as one of the most inscrutable of true-crime mysteries. Now, Piu Eatwell - relentless legal sleuth and atmospheric stylist - cracks the case after 70 years. With recently unredacted FBI files, newly released sections of the LAPD files, and explosive new interviews, Eatwell has unprecedented access to primary evidence and a persuasive culprit.

For decades the FBI let James ''Whitey'' Bulger get away with murder, allowing him continued control of his criminal enterprise in exchange for information. He went on the lam in 1995, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, 2011 followed top-ranked Osama bin Laden on the FBI'''s Ten Most Wanted List, and then was captured in Santa Monica, California weeks after Bin Laden's demise.

This epic work tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family's dispersal after Jefferson's death in 1826. It brings to life not only Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson but also their children and Hemings's siblings, who shared a father with Jefferson's wife, Martha.