Local History

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.

Frank Conroy first visited Nantucket with a gang of college friends in 1955. They came on a whim, and for Conroy it was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with this "small, relaxed oasis in the ocean." This audiobook, part travel diary, part memoir, is a hauntingly evocative and personal journey through Nantucket: its sweeping dunes, rugged moors, remote beaches, secret fishing spots, and hidden forests and cranberry bogs.

In The Northern Cheyenne Exodus in History and Memory, James N. Leiker and Ramon Powers explore how the event has been remembered, told, and retold. They examine the recollections of Indians and settlers and their descendants, and they consider local history, mass-media treatments, and literature to draw thought-provoking conclusions about how this story has changed over time.

The best of this year's true crime writing from master true crime authors RJ Parker, Peter Vronsky, JJ Slate, Sylvia Perrini, and Michael Newton, who give us nine new shocking case accounts of serial killers.

From its quiet beginnings as a picnic grounds in 1872 to its gradual evolution into an amusement park, Geauga Lake became one of Northeast Ohio's most famous attractions. The story of Geauga Lake take listeners through its entire history—from its dramatic climb in status to become a nationally recognized megapark to its almost inexplicable and rapid decline and demise in 2007. The fascinating story illuminates the changing strategies that different owners brought to the park and captures the many changes that regularly transformed the midway.

From CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams, a revelatory account of how one man, four teenagers, and a struggling city collided over race, vigilantism, and self-defense . . . and exposed the fault lines of a nation.

When Kristin L. Hoganson arrived in Champaign, Illinois, after teaching at Harvard, studying at Yale, and living in the DC metro area with various stints overseas, she expected to find her new home, well, isolated. Even provincial. After all, she had landed in the American heartland, a place where the nation's identity exists in its pristine form. Or so we have been taught to believe.

Prairie Gothic is full of Texas lore. Erickson tells the story of people in the context of a specific place. This place, instrumental in shaping their lives, is the flatland prairie of northwestern Texas that has gone by various names (High Plains, South Plains, Staked Plains, and Llano Estacado). One branch of Erickson's family arrived in Texas in 1858. Erickson's family interacts with significant historical figures, such as Cynthia Ann Parker, and includes members of the Estacado Quaker colony.

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.

As a new president takes the White House, Just Cause returns to New York City for the first time in eight years, under the command of its newest leader: Mustang Sally. But not everyone is excited about the expansion of Just Cause. Senator Christine Goodwin, slighted by the team's leadership years before, has made it her mission to put all para-humans on a very short leash while, at the same time, creating her own super-powered militia.

Central Massachusetts is a land of oddities and apparitions. Stories of the strange and paranormal have been passed down from generation to generation and only the local populace has any idea of just how vast and deep their superstitions run. It’s time to truly learn that the world around you is much more than you can touch, taste, smell, see, and hear...or at least that’s what a good story is supposed to do!

The University of California, Berkeley—widely known as "Cal"—is admired worldwide as a bastion of innovation and a hub for progressive thought. Far less known are the university's roots in plunder, warfare, and the promotion of white supremacy. As Tony Platt shows in The Scandal of Cal, these original sins sit at the center of UC Berkeley's history.

Prostitution, gambling, and saloons were a vital, if not universally welcome, part of life in frontier boomtowns. In Saloons, Prostitutes, and Temperance in Alaska Territory, Catherine Holder Spude explores the rise and fall of these enterprises in Skagway, Alaska, between the gold rush of 1897 and the enactment of Prohibition in 1918. Her gritty account offers a case study in the clash between working-class men and middle-class women, and in the growth of women’s political and economic power in the West.

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.

This serves as the first volume of a series covering the amazing 50 states. It looks at facts about each state, their histories, and interesting little tidbits of information about each. In this volume Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, and Maryland are covered.

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.

In this compelling, informative volume, Jimmie R. Hawkins walks the listener through the many forms of Black protest in American history, from pre-colonial times through the George Floyd protests of 2020, including slave ship mutinies, the abolitionist movement, the different approaches to protest, Black Lives Matter, and protests of today's Black athletes, musicians, and intellectuals. Hawkins also covers the backlash to these protests, including the Jim Crow era, the Red Summer of 1919, and modern-day wars on the Black community in the form of the War on Drugs and voter suppression.

A must-listen for all who enjoy Alaska history! Adventurers, crooks, and lawmen flooded into Alaska following the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898. Towns like Nome, Fairbanks, and Valdez blossomed on the tundra and soon filled with merchants, madams, miners, and more.

In 1980, Exxon U.S.A., the world's largest corporation, began development of a five-billion-dollar oil shale industry in the pristine Colorado River Valley. Within eighteen months, Exxon had canceled its elaborate Colony project and 2,100 workers were immediately laid off. Boomtown Blues chronicles the social, environmental, and economic havoc created by one of the most expensive boom and bust cycles in the history of the American West.

The naturalist, author, and advocate for preservation, John Muir (1838-1914) was also known as "John of the Mountains" and "Father of the National Parks". In the spring of 1869, John Muir was looking for ways to fund his explorations of California’s Central Valley region, when a ranch owner offered him a job herding sheep in the Sierra Nevada. In The Yosemite, Muir chronicled his experiences of the beautiful wilderness in appealingly descriptive prose. The audiobook is a treasure trove of portrayals of the shifting phases of the year in Yosemite.