Local History

Indiana's Role in the Civil War recounts the stories of the regiments that served in the War Between the States. Indiana had the second largest per capita number of men fighting for the Union Army in the four years of the war. From the first battle, the Battle of Philippi, to the Grand Review of the Armies Hoosiers played a prominent role in the defeat of the rebellion of the Confederacy. The book includes a county by county history of the regiments as well as the story of the longest raid of the Civil War, Morgan's Raid.

James L. Leloudis and Robert R. Korstad tell the story of race and voting rights, from the end of the Civil War until the present day. They show that battles over the franchise have played out through cycles of emancipatory politics and conservative retrenchment. When race has been used as an instrument of exclusion from political life, the result has been a society in which vast numbers of Americans are denied the elements of meaningful freedom: a good job, a good education, good health, and a good home.

In 1893, the 27.5 million visitors to the Chicago World’s Fair feasted their eyes on the impressive architecture of the White City, lit at night by thousands of electric lights. In addition to marveling at the revolutionary exhibits, most visitors discovered something else: beyond the fair’s 633 acres lay a modern metropolis that rivaled the world’s greatest cities. The Columbian Exposition marked Chicago’s arrival on the world stage, but even without the splendor of the fair, 1893 would still have been Chicago’s greatest year.

Pervasive myths of European domination and indigenous submission in the Americas receive an overdue corrective in this far-reaching revisionary work. Within the indigenous borderlands of the Americas, as this volume shows, Native peoples exercised considerable power, often retaining control of the land, and remaining paramount agents of historical transformation after the European incursion. Conversely, European conquest and colonialism were typically slow and incomplete, as the newcomers struggled to assert their authority.

St. Louis, despite its status as an inland river city frequently relegated to the backwaters of national significance, has stood at the crossroads of international matters for much of its history. From its 18th-century French fur trade origins to post-Cold War business dealings with Latin America and Asia, the city has never neglected nor been ignored by the world outside its borders.

Stories provide the connective tissue of the South. The intrepid Pamela Petro drives from the Carolinas to the Appalachians to the Atlantic seaboard, from Virginia's valleys to Louisiana's swamps to meet the mesmerizing guardians of its history: the storytellers, who often double as local, or national, treasures. A gifted listener, Petro records how stories originate as well as how they are passed down. She paints vivid portraits of the tellers while compiling tales about Jack the trickster, boo-hags and plat-eyes, ghosts, and singing turtles.

We all know of Theodore Roosevelt being the US president from 1901 to 1909, an American politician, statesman, soldier, conservationist, and naturalist. But few know of him being an acclaimed historian. Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West quickly became a bestseller. The first edition of his book sold out in little more than a month and helped establish Roosevelt as a literary man and scholar, placing him on a path toward future greatness.

The Dutch, through the directors of the West India Company, purchased Manhattan Island in 1625. They had come to the New World as traders, not expecting to assume responsibility as the sovereign possessor of a conquered New Netherland. They did not intend to make war on the native peoples around Manhattan Island, but they did; they did not intend to help destroy native cultures, but they did; they intended to be overseas the tolerant, pluralistic, and antimilitaristic people they thought themselves to be - and in so many respects were - at home, but they were not.

The celebration of Washington, DC basketball is long overdue. The DC metro area stands second to none in its contributions to the game. Countless figures who have had a significant impact on the sport over the years have roots in the region, including E. B. Henderson, the first African American certified to teach public school physical education, and Earl Lloyd, the first African American to take the court in an actual NBA game.

When a black man was accused of attacking a white woman in a rural Florida town, a tinderbox of racial hatred was ignited. On New Year's Day 1923, Rosewood, a town of hard-working, middle-class African Americans, was burned to the ground by an angry mob of whites. After hiding in frigid nearby swamps for days, the few survivors never returned.

Driffield’s story is typical of any small market town, but, like these, its story is also unique, not only in its hey-day, with canal builders, railway barons and town-makers ensuring the leap from village to town, but also from earliest times with the visits of nomadic hunters and gatherers. We learn of its rich Anglo-Saxon past, and follow Driffield’s story meandering through the ages, unnoticed by the outside world, and through it all the recurrent theme of people working the land, tending, transforming, remoulding and conserving their common inheritance. This scholarly, yet ...

Hornsea is ordinary, no different from countless other towns and villages scattered across the face of England. Yet, at the same time, it is unique, a product of local conditions and forces, of ceasesless interactions between people and their environment over the last 10,000 years. It is this opposition that gives Hornsea meaning and character. A sense of place. In this new book, archaeologist and historian Stephen Harrison tells Hornsea’s particular story. The result is a fascinating biography of people and landscape, from prehistory to the present day, of generation piled upon ...

There are over fifty settlements in the world which bear the name 'Richmond', yet Richmond in North Yorkshire was the first and can claim to be the 'Mother of all Richmonds'. From the earliest days of human habitation in the Richmond area, to the building of the great castle and on to our own day, this new History of Richmond by Jane Hatcher tells the town's story with academic rigour yet in a form which makes it accessible to the general reader as well as the historian. Fully illustrated, the book contains an up-to-date and comprenesive bibliography for those who wish to take their studies...

Author and journalist Cody McDevitt tells the story of one of the worst civil rights injustices in Western Pennsylvania history. In 1923, in response to the fatal shooting of four policemen, the mayor of Johnstown ordered every African American and Mexican immigrant who had lived in the city for less than seven years to leave. They were given less than a day to move or would face crippling fines or jail time and were forced out at gunpoint.

In 1823, Tennessee historian John Haywood encapsulated a foundational sentiment among the white citizenry of Tennessee when he wrote of a "long continued course of aggression and sufferings" between whites and Native Americans. According to F. Evan Nooe, "aggression" and "sufferings" are broad categories that can be used to represent the framework of factors contributing to the coalescence of the white South.

By tracing the evolution of the categories the United States used to count and classify its population from 1790 to 1940, Schor shows that, far from being simply a reflection of society or a mere instrument of power, censuses are actually complex negotiations between the state, experts, and the population itself. The census is not an administrative or scientific act, but a political one. Counting Americans is a social history exploring the political stakes that pitted various interests and groups of people against each other as population categories were constantly redefined.

The origins of gentrification date back to World War I - only it was sometimes known as “remodeling” then. Dennis Gale’s insightful book The Misunderstood History of Gentrification provides a recontextualization of American gentrification, planning, and policymaking. He argues that gentrification must be understood as an urban phenomenon with historical roots in the very early 20th century.

This history of Pickering reproduces the 1999 hardback and has taken the opportunity to bring the town's story from its beginnings down to 2009. Gordon Home (1878 - 1969) was a prolific author, journalist and artist and was the Art Editor of the ‘Tatler’ magazine. His well-received ‘Yorkshire Coast and Moorland Scenes’ of 1904 led him to Pickering to write its history. He wrote ‘The Evolution of an English Town: Pickering’ in 1905 and the book quickly became established as a model for other local history books. The book was reproduced in hardback in 1999 by the Blackthorn Press ...

The year was 1965. The Beatles, Elvis Presley, and The Righteous Brothers filled the airwaves. Television shows like The Adventures of Ozzy and Harriett and The Andy Griffith Show mirrored the innocence of life in the dusty city of Tucson, AZ. But the sun-baked desert surrounding Tucson was hiding a sinister secret. A psychopath names Charles Schmid, later nicknamed the "Pied Piper of Tucson" by Life magazine, would steal that innocence away, along with the lives of three beautiful teenage girls.

In October 1913, 261 miners and two rescuers died when a massive explosion ripped through a mine operated by Phelps, Dodge & Company in Dawson, New Mexico. Ten years later, a second blast claimed the lives of another 120 miners. Today, Dawson is a deserted ghost town. All that remains is a sea of white iron crosses memorializing the nearly four hundred miners killed in the two explosions-a death toll unmatched by mine disasters in any other town in America.