Today's Shawnee National Forest visitors would not recognize 1930s southern Illinois. Hills and hollows were void of trees, the rivers and creeks choked with eroded topsoil. The need for a national forest was so great that a small group of men from southeastern Illinois vowed to make it happen. Much of the responsibility for promotion fell on newspaper publisher L.O. Trigg. Beginning in 1931, the annual Trails, Tours, and Detours excursion demonstrated the great potential for outdoor recre...

This account of nineteenth-century Missouri vigilantes is "a first rate adventure story [and] an extremely valuable study of the roots of violence in America" (Gary Paulsen, Newbery Medal–winning author of Hatchet).In the 1880s, the Ozark hills around Taney County, Missouri, echoed with the sound of Winchester rifles. Men were lynched from tree limbs by masked night riders. Bundles of switches were tossed on the porches of "loose" men and...

Among the most dangerous criminals of the public enemies era was a man who has long hidden in history's shadows: Tom Brown. In the early 1930s, while he was police chief of St. Paul, Minnesota, Brown became a secret partner of the infamous Barker gang. He profited from their violent crimes, he protected the gang from raids by the nascent FBI—and while he did all this, the gangsters gunned down cops and citizens in his hometown.Big Tom Brown, 6'5" and 275 pounds, continued to enforc...

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...

All traces of Captain Caldwell�s Potawatomi settlement and the Mormon safe haven of Kanesville were gone from the Indian Creek hollow by 1900, when Council Bluffs already seemed a 20th-century city of bright lights, steam, and smokestacks. The old western trails and steamboats disappeared as the city on the east bank of the Missouri River opposite Omaha became a major American railroad center and the industrial and commercial hub of southwest Iowa. Vineyards and orchards surrounded a growi...

Walk into Hinkle Fieldhouse, and you feel it--that palpable sense of history known as the Hinkle mystique. Indiana's basketball cathedral has stood in all its glory at Butler University since 1928. John Wooden, Oscar Robertson and Larry Bird played on its floor. Jesse Owens sprinted to a record at Hinkle, and athletes from around the globe have brought Olympic-level competition to crowds gathered under its steel arches. It was the setting for the climactic scene in Hoosiers, arguably the g...

From the U.S. Olympic team, to �Bowling with the Champs,� to countless corner bars with a couple of lanes in the basement, Milwaukee has lived and breathed this sport. In the late 1800s, German brewers like Capt. Frederick Pabst and the Uihleins offered bowling in their Milwaukee beer gardens. When Abe Langtry brought the American Bowling Congress here in 1905, �Brew City� became bowling central. Today owning a bowling alley is a labor of love, with good reason. It�s the place where you ro...

**Winner of The Hillman Prize for Book Journalism - 2019When the people of Flint, Michigan, turned on their faucets in April 2014, the water pouring out was poisoned with lead and other toxins.**Through a series of disastrous decisions, the state government had switched the city’s water supply to a source that corroded Flint’s aging lead pipes. Complaints about the foul-smelling water were dismissed: the residents of Flint, mostly poor and African American, were not seen as...

New Albany's historic homes boast unique histories and fascinating stories of those who inhabited them. Founded in 1813 below the falls of the Ohio River, the city was Indiana's most populous by the middle of the nineteenth century. Many leading citizens built grand mansions and family dwellings that beamed with prosperity and influence. The architectural legacy during these formative years continued into the early twentieth century and produced historic neighborhoods with a rich collectio...

In 1807, Christian Deardorff and Jesse Slingluff set out for the Ohio frontier. Before leaving, the men laid out the plat of a village that would sit at the banks of the Tuscarawas River. Over the next 10 years as Deardorff toiled away in his bachelor cabin, he held on to the dream of building his vision. The original plat map the two men devised contained 256 lots with land set aside for churches, schools, and a spacious downtown square. Today, over 200 years after Slingluff and Deardorff...

Call it Lake Eerie, according to this book "filled with ghostly encounters of the friendly kind with a bit of local history mixed in" ( Toledo Blade).The residents of Lake Erie's North coast have trouble leaving—even after they die. The area is flooded with the spirits of locals, some friendly, some not. See the sorrowful eyes of the Hauntingly Beautiful High School Student, who floats the corridors looking for her lost boyfriend, and head to an o...

Published in 1973, this first volume in the History of Wisconsin series remains the definitive work on Wisconsin's beginnings, from the arrival of the French explorer Jean Nicolet in 1634, to the attainment of statehood in 1848. This volume explores how Wisconsin's Native American inhabitants, early trappers, traders, explorers, and many immigrant groups paved the way for the territory to become a more permanent society. Including nearly two dozen maps as well as illustrations of ...