Local History

Do you know the WHOLE story of the State of New York, from the first human inhabitants to the years it was a Dutch colony? The state produced four presidents, was the first in many areas, and created its own state of mind. What made New York into the state it has become? Was there something unique about Manhattan Island? Was there something about the people that made them so successful? Why is it called the Empire State? Why was the Erie Canal so important?

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.

What brought the author's family to Texas? What is it about Texas that for centuries has exerted a powerful allure for adventurers and scoundrels, dreamers and desperate souls, outlaws and outliers? In search of answers, Hodge travels across his home state - which he loves and hates in shifting measure - tracing the wanderings of his ancestors into forgotten histories along vanished roads. Here is an unsentimental, keenly insightful attempt to grapple with all that makes Texas so magical, punishing, and polarizing.

In Ludlow, Kentucky, where Confederate flags once dominated the landscape and call for civil war echoed on Facebook, a circus raised its big top—and never left. On January 20, 2025, as Donald Trump returned to office, the KKK plastered the town with hateful fliers, but the circus, a 250-year-old beacon of diversity and inclusion, stood its ground. This is the true, stranger-than-fiction story of how a creative community defied hate, bureaucracy, and small-town politics to transform Ludlow into Kentucky’s hottest real estate market.

Are you fascinated by history's darkest mysteries and the intricate tapestry of human nature? Curious about the forces that led to one of the darkest periods in American history? Wondering how superstition and fear could ignite a whirlwind of chaos and injustice? Dive into the gripping world of 17th-century Massachusetts, where accusations of witchcraft ignited a blaze of hysteria and justice teetered on a precipice. In A Brief History of the Salem Witch Trials, we unravel the captivating and haunting events that transpired during this dark chapter in American history.

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.

Brian Phillips Murphy follows the collaborations between political leaders and a group of unelected political entrepreneurs, including Robert R. Livingston and Alexander Hamilton, who persuaded legislative powers to grant monopolies corporate status in order to finance and manage civic institutions.

The Natchez Indians: A History to 1735 is the story of the Natchez Indians as revealed through accounts of Spanish, English, and French explorers, missionaries, soldiers, and colonists, and in the archaeological record. Because of their strategic location on the Mississippi River, the Natchez Indians played a crucial part in the European struggle for control of the Lower Mississippi Valley.

We all know of Theodore Roosevelt 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.

Trains, planes, and automobiles arrive and forever change the lives of Alaskans throughout Aunt Phil’s Trunk, Volume Three. Hardy souls with hammers and drills, axes and mattocks, mauls and gauges found it took muscle and endurance to lay railroad tracks in Alaska’s untamed wilderness. Other adventurers brought automobiles and airplanes north that transformed the way we mined resources, explored the country and traveled the Great Land.

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 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.

Here is the story of one of Yorkshire's prettiest villages from the earliest times to the present day. It is also the story of the famous people connected with it.

Join Eleanor and Oliver on another adventure as they dig into their family history. Eleanor and Oliver discover a hidden hero, a WASP, or Women Airforce Service Pilot and are determined to help uncover her past and ensure her service to her country is told and remembered. Along the way, they discover more about Ohio's history in aviation and what the future can bring as they visit a multitude of sites. With the help of their friends and family, they help grant her final wishes.

When both levees and governments failed in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, an organization calling itself the Common Ground Collective formed to become the largest anarchist inspired organization in modern US history. In solidarity with people in New Orleans, Common Ground built medical clinics, distributed aid, formed neighborhood assemblies and created food security through community gardens. The group also defied unjust laws by resisting home demolitions, and defended communities from white militias and police brutality.

The Hatfield-McCoy feud has long been the most famous vendetta of the southern Appalachians. Over the years it has become encrusted with myth and error. Scores of writers have produced accounts of it, but few have made any real effort to separate fact from fiction. Novelists, motion picture producers, television script writers, and others have sensationalized events that needed no embellishment. Using court records, public documents, official correspondence, and other documentary evidence, Otis K. Rice presents an account that frees, as much as possible, fact from fiction, event from legend.

On a cold day in early January 1864, Robert E. Lee wrote to Confederate president Jefferson Davis "The time is at hand when, if an attempt can be made to capture the enemy's forces at New Berne, it should be done." Over the next few months, Lee's dispatch would precipitate a momentous series of events as the Confederates, threatened by a supply crisis and an emerging peace movement, sought to seize Federal bases in eastern North Carolina.

In late September 1919, black sharecroppers met to protest unfair settlements for their cotton crops from white plantation owners. Local law enforcement broke up the union's meeting, and the next day a thousand white men from the Delta - and troops of the US Army itself - converged on Phillips County, Arkansas, to "put down" the black sharecroppers' "insurrection". Writer and Delta native Grif Stockley considers the evidence and tells the full story of this incident for the first time, concluding that black people were murdered in Elaine by white mobs and federal soldiers.

John Muir (1838-1914) was an influential naturalist, author, environmental philosopher, and advocate for the preservation of wilderness areas in the United States. In 1869, Muir traveled to California and spent a long time in the area that is now the Yosemite National Park. This narrative takes the form of a hiking guide filled with adventure. Muir was a master of description, providing stirring portraits of the area’s wildlife, waterfalls, valleys, meadows, giant sequoias groves, lakes, mountains, and glaciers.

For John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner, there was one simple rule in politics: “You’ve got to bloody your knuckles.” It’s a maxim that applies in so many ways to the state of Texas, where the struggle for power has often unfolded through underhanded politicking, backroom dealings, and, quite literally, bloodshed. The contentious history of Texas politics has been shaped by dangerous and often violent events, and been formed not just in the halls of power but by marginalized voices omitted from the official narratives.