Small States

In The Small and the Mighty, Sharon McMahon proves that the most remarkable Americans are often ordinary people who didn’t make it into the textbooks. Not the presidents, but the telephone operators. Not the aristocrats, but the schoolteachers. Through meticulous research, she discovers history’s unsung characters and brings their rich, riveting stories to light for the first time.

History is recorded in many ways. According to author James Deetz, the past can be seen most fully by studying the small things so often forgotten. In his completely revised and expanded edition of In Small Things Forgotten, Deetz has added new sections that more fully acknowledge the presence of women and African Americans in Colonial America.

Who owns what is traditionally considered sacred? Can the Catholic Church legally conspire with the federal government to steal the most sacrosanct of Native American holy places? Holes in the Sky, the second in the series Zeb Hanks: Small Town Sheriff with Big Time Troubles, explores these questions in a clash of cultures mixed with mysterious deaths.

There's a reason Emmeline Frothingham left her hometown of Creek Water, Missouri, as soon as humanly possible. That reason is small-minded, judgmental people. After graduating from college, Emmie gets her dream job in New York City. As the head buyer at Silver Spoons - a high-end boutique - and single girl about town, her life is ideal. That is, until the night of The Event, her company's annual awards ball at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Facing the repercussions of her wild night, Emmie is forced to go home to work in her family's business.

A collection of stories from the most famous Western author of all time! Desert Death-Song is a compilation of some of Louis L’Amour’s greatest stories, many of which might otherwise be difficult to find. Whether he was writing under his early pen name, Jim Mayo, or his own, L’Amour’s stories are unforgettable, touching on rough and rugged American ideals, and set in the untamable frontier of the Western United States.

In her new essay collection, the beloved author of High Tide in Tucson brings to us from one of history's darker moments an extended love song to the world we still have. From its opening parable gleaned from recent news about a lost child saved in an astonishing way, the book moves on to consider a world of surprising and hopeful prospects, ranging from an inventive conservation scheme in a remote jungle to the backyard flock of chickens tended by the author's small daughter.

It was a mild May morning in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1862, the second year of the Civil War, when a 23-year-old slave named Robert Smalls did the unthinkable and boldly seized a Confederate steamer. With his wife and two young children hidden on board, Smalls and a small crew ran a gauntlet of heavily armed fortifications in Charleston Harbor and delivered the valuable vessel and the massive guns it carried to nearby Union forces.

Francis J. Bremer focuses on the role of religion in the settlement of the Plymouth Colony and how those values influenced political, intellectual, and cultural aspects of New England life 150 years before the American Revolution. He traces the Puritans' persecution in early 17th-century England for challenging the established national church and the difficulties they faced as refugees in the Netherlands in the 1610s.

Ron Chernow examines the forces that made dynasties like the Morgans, the Warburgs, and the Rothschilds the financial arbiters of the early twentieth century and then rendered them virtually obsolete by the century's end. As he traces the shifting balance of power among investors, borrowers, and bankers, Chernow evokes both the grand theater of capital and the personal dramas of its most fascinating protagonists.

Tallulah James comes from a long line of intelligent college professors with strong Southern roots - and long-buried family secrets. Tallulah's childhood is a tumultuous one: Her mother is often absent as she puts her goals to save the world over her family. Her father's ignored bipolar disorder results in bouts of depression and manic behavior that often leave Tallulah afraid and confused.

Fans of The Conjuring and The Amityville Horror will love this chilling new novel unraveling the tale of a family haunted by the ghosts of their malevolent ancestors’ disturbing past. The decrepit well has been a fountain of terror for generations, an abyss of dread that emits tragedy and death like fog. Its darkness touched Jacob’s soul some twenty years ago, and since moving back to his ancestral home, the chilling feeling of being in front of the old well hasn’t left his troubled mind. But this time, the shadows that creep from the well have taken on a malevolent sentience, ...

A collection of stories capturing what it means to be a cowboy.

Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, quiet Charon has had only two murders. But after years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface. Then a year to the day after Titus’s election, a school teacher is killed by a former student and the student is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies. As Titus investigates the shootings, he unearths terrible crimes.

Beverly Underwood and her arch enemy, Lula Dean, live in the tiny town of Troy, Georgia, where they were born and raised. Now Beverly is on the school board, and Lula has become a local celebrity by embarking on mission to rid the public libraries of all inappropriate books—none of which she’s actually read. To replace the “pornographic” books she’s challenged at the local public library, Lula starts her own lending library in front of her home: a cute wooden hutch with glass doors and neat rows of the worthy literature that she’s sure the town’s readers need.

Western Adventure by Ronnie Ashmore "Ashmore creates fierce characters with confidence and authority. A fresh and welcome Western narrative." -Best-Selling Author Ralph Cotton Jim Long is trying to settle into his new post as marshal of the small quiet town of Leonville. But the town is growing faster than Long thinks it should, the mayor brings a new teacher to town, which brings its own problems and a threat from a gang of rustlers and killers threatens the peace Long has fought to maintain. Now he must face the threat or die trying. Long knows the odds are not in his favor, but he swore ...

Fans of Friday the 13th and Halloween will love this gruesome slasher following a group of teens hunted by a supernatural killer. You can run. You can try to hide. But no matter where you are, the scarecrow will find you. After a heart-wrenching breakup, the last thing high school sophomore Kyle Shoemaker expected was to fight for his life. But that’s exactly what happens after a drunken trip takes he and his friends to the abandoned farm at the edge of town. Nightly, the scarecrow claims one of them, leaving him with little time. Will he unravel the mystery of the scarecrow before it's ...

The ritual killing of a young Apache girl on a reservation in rural Arizona takes the listener through many complex layers of relationships between Apache and Anglo cultures. The myth and spiritual fabric of the Apache community pulls Zeb Hanks, a small town sheriff, through a personal journey, making the murder not just a crime to solve but a cathartic passage. The dead never leave us but they do whisper ghost stories that bring the past back to life. Jake Dablo is a drunken, washed up lawman because of his inability to solve the murder of his only granddaughter.

A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, Adam Gopnik argues that liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights. It is something far more ambitious: the search for radical change by humane measures. Gopnik shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history.

Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire the events of 2020 had clear precursors - and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past. Black rebellion, America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence. Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation’s strife, America on Fire is also a warning: Rebellions will surely continue until an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and equality.

After the loss of her husband a year ago, Grace Evans can’t continue with her career or her life in the city any longer. Lost emotionally, she sells her law practice and decides to spend her summer among the sandy beaches of Florida, taking care of an old inn in Naples Beach with her childhood friend Susan Willows. Maybe the lush palm trees and sun-drenched days filled with sand between her toes will help her find direction again. What she doesn’t expect to find is a secret tucked away in an old hidden locket that will change her life forever. And making things more complicated is local...