The rise and near destruction of Dayton in the early 20th century is chronicled in this visual postcard history. The postcards showcase some of the city's unique commercial buildings, hotels, churches, and residences, many now long gone due to urban renewal and highway construction in the 1960s and 1970s. Landmarks featured include the National Soldiers' Home, built for veterans of the Civil War in 1868, and there is an entire chapter dedicated to the events of the 1913 flood that forever ...

What really happened on the circus train in 1918? Read the story of this tragedy for the entertainment industry of the time. In the cool, pre-dawn hours on a June night in 1918, a train engineer closed his cab window as he chugged toward Hammond, Indiana. He drifted to sleep, and his train bore down on the idle Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus Train. Soon after, the sleeping engineer's locomotive plowed into the circus train. In the subsequent wreckage and blaze, more than two hundred circus perfo...

Government officials and missionaries wanted all Sioux men to become self-sufficient farmers, wear pants, and cut their hair. The Indians, confronted by a land-hungry white population and a loss of hunting grounds, sought to exchange title to their homeland for annuities of cash and food, schools and teachers, and farms and agricultural knowledge. By 1862 the Sioux realized that their extensive kinship network and religion were in jeopardy and that the government would not fulfill its prom...

St. Louis was a city under siege during Prohibition. Seven different criminal gangs violently vied for control of the town�s illegal enterprises. Although their names (the Green Ones, the Pillow Gang, the Russo Gang, Egan�s Rats, the Hogan Gang, the Cuckoo Gang and the Shelton Gang) are familiar to many, their exploits have remained largely undocumented until now. Learn how an awkward gunshot wound gave the Pillow Gang its name and why Willie Russo�s bizarre midnight interview with a repor...

Accounts of the early events of the computing industry—the Turing machine, the massive Colossus, the ENIAC computer—are well-told tales, and equally well known is the later emergence of Silicon Valley and the rise of the personal computer. Yet there is an extraordinary untold middle history—with deep roots in Minnesota. From the end of World War II through the 1970s, Minnesota was home to the first computing-centered industrial district in the world.Drawing on rare archival documen...

From the end of the Great War to the final years of the 1950s, Kansas Citians lived in a manner worthy of a place called Paris of the Plains. The title did more than nod to the perfumed ladies who shopped at Harzfeld's Parisian or the one-thousand-foot television antenna nicknamed the "Eye-full Tower." It spoke to the character of a town that worked for Boss Tom and danced for Count Basie but transcended both the Pendergast era and the Jazz Age. Author John Simonson introduces readers to a...

In this all-new addition to the People of Wisconsin series, author Susan Mikos traces the history of Polish immigrants as they settled in America’s northern heartland. The second largest immigrant population after Germans, Poles put down roots in all corners of the state, from the industrial center of Milwaukee to the farmland around Stevens Point, in the Cutover, and beyond. In each locale, they brought with them a hunger to own land, a willingness to work hard, and a passion for building...

The Chevrolet car and truck business traces its roots back to Michigan�s lumber industry in the middle of the 19th century. Lumber mills gave way to carriage and wagon manufacturing and the claim, before motorcars burst on the scene, that Flint was the �vehicle capital of the world.� This is the story of how those wagon makers quickly converted to producing automobiles, overtaking automotive pioneer and archrival Ford in sales, and building the Chevrolet brand into the global powerhouse en...

On July 1, 1895, under the direction of warden James French, the first federal prison was born. That same year, St. Louis architects Eames and Young went to work drawing up plans for an institution that would house the most notorious offenders in the nation�s history. At sunrise on March 1, 1897, 300 inmates and 30 guards marched three miles to the construction site located on the southwest corner of the military reservation. From sunup to sundown seven days a week in the hot Kansas summer...

Life, Death, and Archaeology at Fort Blue Mounds is an archaeological detective story illuminating the lives of white settlers in the lead-mining region during the tragic events of the historically important conflict known as the Black Hawk War.Focusing on the strategically located Fort Blue Mounds in southwestern Wisconsin, Robert A. Birmingham summarizes the 1832 conflict and details the history of the fort, which played a major role not only in U.S. military and militia operatio...

In 1837 the Ioways, an Indigenous people who had called most of present-day Iowa and Missouri home, were suddenly bound by the Treaty of 1836 with the U.S. federal government to restrict themselves to a two-hundred-square-mile parcel of land west of the Missouri River. Forcibly removed to the newly created Great Nemaha Agency, the Ioway men, women, and children, numbering nearly a thousand, were promised that through hard work and discipline they could enter mainstream American society. Al...

From our contemporary vantage point, we should take the time to look back to how people in American communities lived at the beginning of the 20th century. The focus of this work is Evansville - in the early 1900s, the only emerging metropolis between Louisville and St. Louis, and then the radial center of a hinterland stretching in all directions for at least 100 miles. Evansville illustrates how the city landscape changed because of the early industrial era, how people made a living and ...