Local History

Anyone who has waited in a Christmas line for the Walnut Room's Great Tree can attest that Chicago's loyalty to Marshall Field's is fierce. Dayton-Hudson even had to take out advertising around town to apologize for changing the Field's hallowed green bags. And with good reason—the store and those who ran it shaped the city's streets, subsidized its culture, and heralded its progress. The resulting commercial empire dictated wholesale trade terms in Calcutta and sponsored towns in North Carolina, but its essence was always Chicago.

Notable shipwrecks of Lake Michigan throughout a century of enterprise, industry, heroism, and disaster on the Great Lakes The Great Lakes are graveyards of a vast number of shipwrecks (30,000 by some estimates), and Lake Michigan has more than the other four lakes combined. The stories of those wrecks tell the history of that mighty lake in its endless, mercurial challenge to human endeavor.

The Quaker City and its hospitals were pioneers in the field of mental health. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, its institutions were crowded and patients lived in shocking conditions. The mentally ill were quartered with the dangerously criminal. By 1906, the city had purchased a vast acreage of farmland incorporated into the city, and the Philadelphia Hospital dubbed its new venture Byberry City Farms. From the start, its history was riddled with corruption and committees, investigations and inquests, appropriations and abuse.

The earliest settlers in this region were confronted by food shortages, conflicts with native tribes, and the difficulties of settling a new land with little support. Through the use of primary source materials, this audiobook provides the compelling story of the Delaware colony and the conflicts faced by its various leaders, up to and including the early moments of the American Revolutionary period.

They call Montauk the end of the world, a spit of land jutting into the Atlantic. The house was a ramshackle split-level set on a hill, and each summer 31 people would sleep between its thin walls and shag carpets. Against the moonlight the house's octagonal roof resembled a bee's nest. It was dubbed The Hive. In 2013, John Glynn joined the share house. Packing his duffel for that first Memorial Day weekend, he prayed for clarity. At 27, he was crippled by an all-encompassing loneliness, a feeling he had carried in his heart for as long as he could remember.

This book includes new heartbreaking stories, such as the seven canyoneers in 2015 who all died in a flash flood in Keyhole Canyon, two separate BASE jumping deaths, rock climbing, and flash flood deaths in the Narrows. Zion National Park is home to majestic and wondrous canyons, cliffs, crags, mesas, rivers, and slot canyons. World travelers remain in awe as they drive, walk, hike, and climb into such a unique place that is filled with vibrant, sacred, and mystical energy.

This engaging history pulls listeners back to a chaotic time along the lower Rio Grande in the mid-19th century. Texas Devils challenges the time-honored image of "good guys in white hats" to reveal the more complicated and sobering reality behind the Ranger Myth. Michael L. Collins demonstrates that, rather than bringing peace to the region, the Texas Rangers contributed to the violence and were often brutal in their injustices against Spanish-speaking inhabitants.

When gold was first discovered on the American River above Sutter's Fort in January 1848, California was sparsely populated frontier territory not yet ceded to the United States from Mexixo. The discovery triggered a massive influx as hundreds of thousands of people scrambled to California in search of riches, braving dangerous journeys across the Pacific, around Cape Horn, and through the Isthmus of Panama, as well as across America's vast, unsettled wilderness. Cities sprang up overnight, in response to the demand for supplies and services of all kinds.

Author William S. Kiser reshapes the history of the Southwest, underlining the role of the military not just in obtaining territory but in retaining it.

In two southern Illinois towns only forty miles apart, explosions killed 111 men at the Centralia No. 5 mine in 1947 and 119 men at the New Orient No. 2 mine in West Frankfort in 1951. Robert E. Hartley and David Kenney explain the causes of the accidents, identify who was to blame, and detail the emotional impact the disasters had on the survivors, their families, and their communities.

Justin Pitre was born and raised on his grandfather's Louisiana bayou, and he has made a promise to keep his family's prized 500-acre property safe. But across town, Big-Tex oil bigwig Tom Huff and his company have major plans to cash in on the resources that lie below the bayou.

Thing most terrifying thing about serial killers is that sometimes, they’re just like us, as the interesting facts in this true crime collection reveal. The compilation of trivia in this serial killer true crime anthology goes beyond the familiar stories to give you a glimpse of some of the more horrifying aspects of people who become famous for acts of barbarianism that are unfathomable for most of us.

Goliad has been an important site in Texas history since Spanish colonial days, but is best known for two of the most controversial episodes of the Texas Revolution: the Fannin Battleground at Coleto Creek and Nuestra Senora de Loreto (Presidio La Bahia), site of the Goliad Massacre. In Remember Goliad!, Craig H. Roell tells the story of the region with clarity and precision.

Filled with hundreds of darkly fascinating tales of murderous mayhem, 50 States of Murder is a chilling work of storytelling and an authoritative survey of the United States’ homicidal history. Master true crime author Harold Schechter explores each state’s most grizzly, gruesome, and notorious murders that have passed into regional lore, from Iowa’s Cornfield Killer to the Texarkana Moonlight Murders to the Beauty School Barbarian of Arizona.

Living Landmarks of Chicago goes beyond the what, when, and where to tell the how and why of 50 Chicago landmarks. More than a book about architecture, these are stories of the people who made Chicago and many of its most popular tourist attractions what they are today.

Freedom, Land & Community: A History of McLean County Illinois, 1730-1900 tells the story of the diverse peoples and events of this county. Using sources contemporary with the events described, it relates the struggles to build communities and secure freedom - or a freedom as each community defined it. Native peoples, women and men, African Americans, Irish and German immigrants all sought and contested for their freedom. People whose voices have not been heard in previous works about central Illinois are included here.

William Elliott Hazelgrove provides the exciting and sprawling history behind the 1933 World's Fair, the last of the golden age. He reveals the story of the six millionaire businessmen, dubbed The Secret Six, who beat Al Capone at his own game, ending the gangster era as prohibition was repealed. The story of an intriguing woman, Sally Rand, who embodied the World's Fair with her own rags to riches story and brought sex into the open.

Acclaimed Southern author Dennis Covington was a National Book Award finalist. Redneck Riviera is the true story of Covington’s bizarre encounters with a lawless band of gun-toting swamp-dwellers in Central Florida who’ve illegally claimed the two-and-a-half acres of land he inherited from his father.

This book is based on visitor descriptions of antebellum Mobile, Alabama's physical and social environment. Mobile's foundational era is a period in which the city transformed from a struggling colonial outpost into one of the nation's most significant economic powerhouses, largely owing to the cotton trade and the labor of enslaved people. On the eve of the Civil War, the Mobile ranked as the fourth most populous community in what would soon become the Confederacy, and within the Gulf Coast region, it stood second only to New Orleans in population, wealth, and influence.

The ship 'General Carleton' was built in Whitby in 1777 and sank off the coast of Poland in 1785. When she was excavated in the 1990s a wide range of artefacts were recovered many of which, due to being coated in tar from the ship's cargo, were in a remarkable state of preservation - most notably a unique collection of sailors' clothing. It is because of the picture these objects give us about life, both aboard and ashore, for 18th-century mariners from Whitby and other coastal towns in the North-East, that 'General Carleton' has been called the 'Yorkshire Mary Rose'. This book is the story...