State Local category: 1635 books

While there are more than 15,000 museums in our country**,** visitors get to see only about five percent of any institution’s collections. Most museums simply don’t have room to display everything they’ve got. However, there are a wide variety of surprising and intriguing reasons that, for example,...

As Down East Books celebrates 50 years of great book publishing, it seems appropriate to reflect upon the contributions Maine has made that have had significant cultural and historical impacts on both the United States and the World. Did you know that the caterpillar tread, common on bulldozers and...

Examining California's formative years, this innovative study seeks to discover the origins of the California dream and the social, psychological, and symbolic impact it has had not only on Californians but also on the rest of the country.

Warning: with This Used to Be Chicago as your guide, you may never look at Chicago the same again. Every building has a past—author Joni Hirsch Blackman finds the stories behind more than 90 Chicago buildings that used to be something else: the liquor store that used to be a speakeasy during Prohibition;...

“A splendid piece of work.” — Edmund Morris In a unique project, author Daniel Ruddy has carefully extracted Teddy Roosevelt’s most relevant and telling comments—from letters, books, speeches, and other sources—and organized them to form a fairly full, always colorful, and highly...

For generations, boaters and train passengers have been mystified and intrigued by the sight of a castlelike structure looming in the Hudson River, near Fishkill. Bannerman Castle unveils the history of this site: an island arsenal, built to resemble a Scottish castle. The story begins in 1900, when...

On January 30, 1847, the small harbor village of Yerba Buena was rechristened "San Francisco." As the Gold Rush quickly propelled the population to over 50,000, fortunes made in the silver Comstock lode and the railroad transformed the area into the financial and cultural center of the West. Captured...

The Boundary Waters region of Minnesota and Ontario is a vast wilderness of quiet beauty, visited and loved by many, but home to only a rugged few. In 1928, Justine Kerfoot arrived, a Northwestern University graduate student headed for medical school until her family lost both their Illinois homes in...

**The history of Bay Area Rapid Transit, as told by "Mr. BART" himself ** When BART opened in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1972, it became a catalyst for a renaissance in modern rail transit, both nationally and internationally. The concept as sold to Bay Area voters was gargantuan:...

We Fought the Road is the story of the building of the Alaska-Canada Highway during World War II. More than one third of the 10,607 builders were black; thought to be incapable of performing on a war front by many of their white commanding officers. Their task--which required punching through...

Kennedy v. Nixon is a book for everyone who thinks they know what happened in the pivotal election year of 1960. For fifty years we've accepted Theodore White's premise (from The Making of the President, 1960) that Kennedy ran a brilliant campaign while Nixon committed blunder after blunder. But...

A History of the City of Brooklyn and Kings County (Volume I) At the time of his death, in 1885, Mr. Ostrander had completed considerable MS. for a history of the City of Brooklyn and Kings County; had prepared many chronological notes with a view to fuller writing, and had accumulated a mass...

Davenport's report, like his series on the work house and the lunatic asylum on Blackwell's Island, gives a good account of how orphans and the children of the poor and the indigent were handled in mid nineteenth century America. Bits of the history of social work is revealed in all three pieces.

In June 1863, General Robert E. Lee and the 75,000-strong Army of Northern Virginia launched a second invasion of the North, crossing into Maryland and Pennsylvania to try to win a decisive victory over Federal forces. On July 1, Lees army encountered Major General Meades 90,000 strong Army of the Potamac...