Showing titles in State & Local

The history of New Orleans is one of contrasts: Heroes and villains, catastrophe and celebration, sinners and saints. In this New Orleans, a serial-killing axeman threatens to murder anyone not playing jazz. A fearless band of missionary nuns pushes to civilize the frontier. During World War II, Nazi U-boats lurk off the coast, while Denton Crocker's battle with local mosquitoes contributes to victory in the Pacific.

When Singer sewing machine tycoon Edward Clark built a luxury apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the late 1800s, it was derisively dubbed “the Dakota” for being as far from the center of the downtown action as its namesake territory on the nation’s western frontier. Despite its remote location, the quirky German Renaissance-style castle, with its intricate façade, peculiar interior design, and gargoyle guardians peering down on Central Park, was an immediate hit, particularly among the city’s well-heeled intellectuals and artists.

Nagle chronicles New York City's 400-year struggle with trash and traces the city's waste-management efforts from a time when filth overwhelmed the streets to the far more rigorous practices of today, when the Big Apple is as clean as it's ever been. Throughout, Nagle reveals the many unexpected ways in which sanitation workers stand between our seemingly well-ordered lives and the sea of refuse that would otherwise overwhelm us. In the process, she changes the way we understand cities—and ourselves within them.

*The inspiration for the CNN original series Vegas: The Story of Sin City* “Outstanding pop-culture history.” —Newsday The “smart and zippy account” (The Wall Street Journal) of how Las Vegas saved Elvis and Elvis saved Las Vegas in the greatest musical comeback of all time. Elvis’s...

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...

The Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Harry S. Truman, whose presidency included momentous events from the atomic bombing of Japan to the outbreak of the Cold War and the Korean War, told by America’s beloved and distinguished historian. The life of Harry S. Truman is one of the greatest...

Within hours of the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the FBI had evidence pointing to Islamic extremists. But incredibly, federal authorities quickly squelched all investigations implicating Middle Eastern suspects. Here, award-winning investigative reporter Jayna Davis shares a gripping and intensely personal account of her arrival on the scene 13 minutes after the blast, the worldwide search for suspects, and the abrupt abandonment of the manhunt for John Doe #2.

By his longtime friend and a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, the definitive biography of Larry McMurtry, the legendary author and screenwriter of Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show, and Brokeback Mountain, who transformed our vision of the West. Before Larry McMurtry became one of the...

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.

In My Forty Years with Ford, Charles Sorensen-sometimes known as "Henry Ford's man," sometimes as "Cast-iron Charlie"-tells his own story, and it is as challenging as it is historic. He emerges as a man who was not only one of the great production geniuses of the world but also a man who called the plays as he saw them. He was the only man who was able to stay with Ford for almost the full history of his empire, yet he never hesitated to go against Ford when he felt the interests of the company demanded...

The true story of James Howard Snook, Theora Hix, and one of the most shocking crimes of the 1920s. In the sweltering summer of 1929, the people of Columbus, Ohio, were enthralled by the story of Dr. James Howard Snook—an Ohio State University veterinary professor and Olympic gold...

In this exceptional cultural history, Atlantic Senior Editor Ronald Brownstein—“one of America's best political journalists (The Economist)—tells the kaleidoscopic story of one monumental year that marked the city of Los Angeles’ creative peak, a glittering moment when popular culture...

For generations of Americans, the word Antietam - the name of a bucolic stream in western Maryland - held the same sense of horror and carnage that the date 9/11 does for Americans today. But Antietam eclipses even this modern tragedy as America's single bloodiest day, on which 22,000 men became casualties in a war to determine our nation's future.

This audiobook explores the deep past and examines the latest knowledge on bison anatomy and physiology, how bison responded to climate change (especially drought), and early bison hunters and pre-contact trade. It also focuses on the era of European contact, in particular the arrival of the horse, and some of the first known instances of over-hunting. By the 19th century, bison reached a "tipping point" as a result of new tanning practices, an early attempt at protective legislation, and ventures to introducing cattle as a replacement stock.

Oakland is a blues city, brawling and husky . . . Often overshadowed by San Francisco, its twinkling sister city across the Bay, Oakland is itself an American wonder. The city is surrounded by and filled with natural beauty—mountains and hills and lakes and a bay—and architecture that...

The New York Times bestseller now in paperback with a new epilogue. In March 1836, the Mexican army led by General Santa Anna massacred more than two hundred Texians who had been trapped in the Alamo. After thirteen days of fighting, American legends Jim Bowie and Davey Crockett died there...

In Boston Celtics: Where Have You Gone? fans can catch up with their favorite players from past and present.

In This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed, civil rights scholar Charles E. Cobb Jr., describes the vital role that armed self-defense played in the survival and liberation of black communities in America during the Southern Freedom Movement of the 1960s.

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.

Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century, and when they're gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and codirector of the Manhattan-based non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York.