Local History

When President Thomas Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Purchase - the vast, unknown lands between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico - he promptly established an expedition to map America's new frontier. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark outfitted the "Corps of Discovery," and on May 14, 1804, 45 men in 3 boats set off up the Mississippi.

Greg Donahue’s The Minuteman, tells the story of one of Newark’s native sons; ex-prizefighter and longtime Zwillman enforcer Sidney Abramowitz, a.k.a. Nat Arno, who took over leadership of the Minutemen in 1934 and made it his personal business to put an end to what he saw as the Bund’s “anti-American” activities. For six years, Arno and his crew of vigilantes battled Newark’s Nazis at every turn. The Minuteman is a story of the ethics of violence in the face of fascism; a forgotten legacy that is as relevant now as it was nearly a hundred years ago.

Welcome to the United States of Cryptids, where mysterious monsters lurk in the dark forests, deep lakes, and sticky swamps of all fifty states. From the infamous Jersey Devil to the obscure Snallygaster, travel writer and chronicler of the strange J. W. Ocker not only uncovers the bizarre stories of these creatures but investigates the ways in which communities have embraced and celebrated their local cryptids.

As America struggles with an economic debacle akin to the Great Depression, nothing could be timelier than an authoritative account of the New Deal, masterfully written by Michael Hiltzik, author of the acclaimed history of the Hoover Dam, Colossus.

In this richly peopled, vividly rendered narrative, Hiltzik describes how the urgent short-term relief measures of Franklin Roosevelt’s Hundred Days evolved into a transformative concept of the federal role in American life.

In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation. In riveting prose, These Truths tells the story of America, beginning in 1492, to ask whether the course of events has proven the nation's founding truths or belied them.

In Gotham, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have produced a monumental work of history, one that ranges from the Indian tribes that settled in and around the island of Manna-hata, to the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898. It is an epic narrative, a story as vast and as varied as the city it chronicles, and it underscores that the history of New York is the story of our nation. The events and people who crowd this audiobook guarantee that this is no mere local history. It is in fact a portrait of the heart and soul of America....

Martin A. Lee traces the dramatic social history of marijuana, from its origins to its emergence in the 1960s as a defining force in a culture war that has never ceased. Lee describes how the illicit marijuana subculture overcame government opposition and morphed into a dynamic, multibillion-dollar industry. Colorful, illuminating, and at times irreverent, this is a fascinating listen for recreational users and patients, students and doctors, musicians and accountants, Baby Boomers and their kids, and anyone who has ever wondered about the secret life of this ubiquitous herb.

When 25-year-old Harry Walker was killed by a bear in Yellowstone Park in 1972, the civil trial prompted by his death became a proxy for bigger questions about American wilderness management that had been boiling for a century. At immediate issue was whether the Park Service should have done more to keep bears away from humans, but what was revealed as the trial unfolded was just how fruitless our efforts to regulate nature in the parks had always been.

Author Foxx Nolte gives listeners a glimpse behind the curtain of the most magical place on earth. Millions of people a year visit Walt Disney World, but few would consider it to be a place with any real history. But hidden just below the surface, past the blanket of pixie dust, is a story as vivid and bizarre as any. It is a history of corporate politics, urban planning, crazy ambitions, and failed schemes. The Hidden History of Walt Disney World takes you on a journey that stretches from "Old Florida" to the events that made Walt Disney World what it is today.

An anything-but-dry history textbook, Washington's History is a fascinating walk through the sweeping story of a place and its people. For centuries, the natural beauty and riches of the Northwest have excited the human imagination, from its first peoples to seafaring explorers, to westward-thinking pioneers, to technological thinkers and giants. A Washington resident himself, author Harry Ritter offers fifty-five vignettes that comprise an entertaining and informative picture of life in the Far Northwest.

This is the heralded "definitive history" of Florida. No other book so fully or accurately captures the highs and lows, the grandeur and the craziness, the horrors and the glories of the past 500 years in the Land of Sunshine.

How an ancient land became a great democracy. Longlisted for Best Non Fiction in the Indie Book Awards 2026 'Tony Abbott should be congratulated ... This history of Australia is vivid, readable, provocative' Geoffrey Blainey, historian 'I think it's very good' Tom Holland, historian Australia is...

In the summer of 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration and a watershed literary event when Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was first published in 1941 to enormous critical acclaim. This unsparing record of place, the people who shaped the land, and the rhythm of their lives is intensely moving and unrelentingly honest, and today, it stands as a poetic tract of its time.

On the banks of the River Mersey is a city with a radical character, shaped by its geography and the achievements of its community - in music, culture and politics. Liverpool is now defined mostly by its appetite for football and the continental successes of its most renowned club. What then does it mean to be a local 'Red' - sculpted by the city's social history - in an age of global expansion? Former players, dedicated fans and civic leaders explain the relationship between the club they support and the city of their birth, exploring the events and moments in time that moulded their ...

The 20th mystery in the #1 New York Times-bestselling Armand Gamache series. Somewhere out there, in the darkness, a black wolf is feeding. Several weeks ago, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec and his team uncovered and stopped a domestic terrorist attack in Montréal...

"With humor and lyrical grace," Kathleen Norris meditates on a place in the American landscape that is at once desolate and sublime, harsh, and forgiving, steeped in history and myth (San Francisco Chronicle). A combination of reporting and reflection, Dakota reminds us that wherever we go, we chart our own spiritual geography.

Lakes, Labor, and Long Memory traces the real history beneath the politeness, from Indigenous governance and broken treaties to logging camps, iron mines, labor movements, cities shaped by paperwork, and a political culture built on memory rather than myth. This is not a brochure and it is not an apology. It is an irreverent, unsentimental look at how people in Minnesota learned to survive through cooperation, argue without disengaging, and build systems because isolation failed them again and again. Niceness here was never softness. It was strategy.

"Brassard's accents—whether French Canadian, Italian, or continental French—create indelible characters. His performance lets us feel Reine Marie's warmth and Armand's affectionate nature, and he adds an additional layer to surly Ruth and her potty-mouthed duck. Exciting and entertaining."...

From its inception, Atlantic City has always been a town dedicated to the fast buck, and this wide-reachinghistory offers a riveting account of its past 100 year, from the city's heyday as a Prohibition-era mecca of lawlessness to its rebirth as a legitimate casino resort in the modern era.

History of the American Frontier 1763-1893 by Frederic L. Paxson, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin. Houghton Mifflin Company 1924. Pulitzer Prize-winner in History, 1925. The prize-winning History of the American Frontier, 1763-1893 covers a very wide sweep of topics, with unusual strength in handling violent relations between the frontiersman and the Indians. Paxson emphasized the impact on people of the process of moving to the west, downplaying the static aspects of specific localities.