Showing titles in State & Local

On June 4, 2004, Marvin Heeymeyer unleashed his gigantic, armored, tank-like bulldozer upon the small town of Granby, Colorado. It was an act of defiant, but misguided, revenge upon those who he perceived had done him wrong in a long series of local property disputes. Over a period of serveral hours, Heemeyer proceeded to cause mayhem and destruction while overwhelming the efforts of local police to stop the Killdozer in its tracks.

Gosnell is the untold story of America's most prolific serial killer. In 2013, Dr. Kermit Gosnell was convicted of killing four people, including three babies, but is thought to have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands more in a 30-year killing spree. ABC News correspondent Terry Moran described Gosnell as "America's most prolific serial killer".

First published in 1956, No-No Boy was virtually ignored by a public eager to put World War II and the Japanese internment behind them. No-No Boy tells the story of Ichiro Yamada, a fictional version of the real-life "no-no boys". Yamada answered "no" twice in a compulsory government questionnaire as to whether he would serve in the armed forces and swear loyalty to the United States. Unwilling to pledge himself to the country that interned him and his family, Ichiro earns two years in prison and the hostility of his family and community when he returns home to Seattle.

For two years, Scots-born John Muir lived in a small cabin along the Yosemite creek, observing the valley's natural beauty and reading Emerson under the stars. The experience forged a lifelong affinity with the site, which would result in its establishment as a national park in 1890. Originally written as a guidebook to the park, The Yosemite describes every aspect of wildlife and landscape that one might encounter there.

In 1934, hundreds of jobless World War I veterans were sent to the remote Florida Keys to build a highway from Miami to Key West. The Roosevelt Administration was making a genuine effort to help these down-and-out vets. But the attempt to help them turned into a tragedy. The supervisors in charge of the veterans misunderstood the danger posed by hurricanes in the low-lying Florida Keys. The hurricane that struck the Upper Florida Keys on the evening of September 2, 1935, is still the most powerful hurricane to make landfall in the US.

On 20 June 1994, a gunman opened fire on the patrons and staff of the Fairchild Air Force Base hospital. Four days later, a B-52 bomber with four souls onboard went down in a fiery crash. Hundreds of ordinary men and women experienced the tragedies...countless others had struggled to prevent them. Everyone who met the would-be gunman thought he was odd, but the disturbed airman struck fear in those who knew him. Doctors had him committed to a military psychiatric ward, only to watch him slip through the cracks of a broken system.

The most recent state to join the union, Hawaii is the only one to have once been a royal kingdom. After its discovery by Captain Cook in the late 18th century, Hawaii was fought over by European powers determined to take advantage of its position as the crossroads of the Pacific. The arrival of the first missionaries marked the beginning of the struggle between a native culture with its ancient gods, sexual libertinism, and rites of human sacrifice and the rigid values of the Calvinists.

Recalling the classic warnings against militarism, from George Washington's farewell address to Dwight Eisenhower's denunciation of the military-industrial complex, Johnson explores the trend of militarism that is bankrupting the United States and creating conditions for a new century of virulent blowback.

Fifteen-year-old Carolyn Maull McKinstry was just a few feet away when the Klan - planted bomb that killed four of her friends exploded in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. It was one of the seminal moments in the Civil Rights movement, a sad day in American history…and the turning point in a young girl's life.

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.

On the morning of June 1, 1921, a white mob numbering in the thousands marched across the railroad tracks dividing black from white in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and obliterated a black community then celebrated as one of America's most prosperous. The Burning will recreate the town of Greenwood at the height of its prosperity, explore the currents of hatred, racism, and mistrust between its black residents and neighboring Tulsa's white population, narrate events leading up to and including Greenwood's annihilation, and document the subsequent silence that surrounded the tragedy.

Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each.

Are you interested in the history of one of the most isolated kingdoms on Earth? Then this audiobook is for you! When most people hear the phrase “ancient Hawaii”, it brings up a certain air of mystery and intrigue. Some might think of tattooed tribesmen sailing across the vast emptiness of the Pacific Ocean under the moonlight, dancing around campfires to connect with their gods, or living on the sides of volcanos. But is this an accurate depiction? Or is there more to the early people of Hawaii?

During the bitter winter of 1692/93, a group of young Puritan women in the colonial town of Salem, Massachusetts, accused more than 200 of their neighbors and fellow townspeople of using witchcraft to injure and torment them. This was an incredibly serious allegation that led to sensational court proceedings and ended with the execution of 19 people.

When two bombs exploded at the densely crowded finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, the whole world watched in shock as the story unfolded. First, the death toll and life-altering injuries. Next, the identification of the suspects - Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev - and the tense manhunt that brought Boston to a standstill. And, finally, the courageous and inspiring recovery of a wounded American city. Long Mile Home is the riveting tale of that tragic, surreal, and ultimately inspiring week.

In this now classic text, Martha Beckwith skillfully navigated an expansive collection of books, articles, and manuscripts to compile the definitive collection of mythological narratives of the native Hawaiian peoples. In addition to its importance for Hawaiian folklore and ethnology proper, Beckwith situates these stories within their broader regional context, offering comparisons to the traditions of Tahiti, Tonga, Samoa and other island nations.

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.

For Chinese immigrant Wong Chut King, surviving in San Francisco meant a life in the shadows. His passing on March 6, 1900, would have been unremarkable if a city health officer hadn't noticed a swollen black lymph node on his groin - a sign of bubonic plague. Empowered by racist pseudoscience, officials rushed to quarantine Chinatown while doctors examined Wong's tissue for telltale bacteria. If the devastating disease was not contained, San Francisco would become the American epicenter of an outbreak that had already claimed 10 million lives worldwide.

Born into poverty in Mississippi at the close of the 19th century, Charley Patton and Jimmie Rodgers established themselves among the most influential musicians of their era. In Tune tells the story of the parallel careers of these two pioneering recording artists - one white, one black - who moved beyond their humble origins to change the face of American music.

Many other mainline Christians viewed the Quakers as a dangerous sect, so much so that they pressured the British Parliament to pass the Quaker Act of 1662. This act set forth in law the “prescribed form” of prayer and worship as designated by the state. It was a formula that specifically left the traditions of the Quakers out. Unable to gain acceptance in England, the Quakers would soon leave the place of their origin altogether and try their luck in a brave new world on another continent.