The city of St. Louis is known for its African American citizens and their many contributions to the culture within its borders, the country, and the world. Images of Modern America: African American St. Louis profiles some of the events that helped shape St. Louis from the 1960s to the present. Tracing key milestones in the city's history, this book attempts to pay homage to those African Americans who sacrificed to advance fair socioeconomic conditions for all. In the closing decades of ...

To book a ride on the "World's Shortest Airline" or learn aerial stunts from the redheaded widow of Lawrence Avenue, you've got to go through the airports buried beneath the housing developments and shopping malls of Chicagoland. Many of these airports sprang up after World War I, when training killed more pilots than combat, and the aviation pioneers who developed Chicago's flying fields played a critical role in getting the nation ready to dare the skies in World War II. Author Nick Seli...

The real story of the "unsinkable" Titanic survivor and her early life in the Midwest.In the film version of the life of the "Unsinkable Molly Brown," she is rescued from the Colorado River and raised in the Rocky Mountains, but the actual Margaret Tobin Brown was born and raised in Hannibal, Missouri. Her formative years took place in the town's Gilded Age; the railroad brought in lumber barons, and as the wealth of Hannibal grew, so too did the dreams of ...

Unearth a gold mine of spooky history and meet the spirits that haunt this South Dakota landmark—photos included.The Wild West may be tamed, but Deadwood's notorious past has not relinquished its hold on its corner of the Badlands or its place in popular imagination. And no wonder. If Wild Bill Hickok found its streets a little too rough, it should come as no surprise that the gamblers, gunslingers, and general mischief-makers who put down roots at Deadwood's saloo...

Missourians could hardly have made a more appropriate decision than to name their capital city after Thomas Jefferson. A meeting-place of major rivers, Missouri became a gateway to the promised land--the beckoning West opened up to Americans by Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase.In the era of overland traders and steamboat pilots, of Thomas Hart Benton and Mark Twain, life in Missouri was strongly flavored by the Jeffersonian spirit, expressed in a suspicion of large c...

A collection of local photographer Richard E. Stoner's work which captured Ashtabula's transformations over time.Post-World War II Ashtabula was a major Great Lakes port with a thriving downtown. Local photographer Richard E. Stoner began taking photographs of the growing city in 1938, and for the next 58 years, his lens captured Ashtabula's businesses, industries, and citizens. His commercial accounts ranged from the harbor's Pinney Dock and Transport Company, to Main Avenue's locally-own...

Winner of the Minnesota Book Award and the Red River Heritage Award!The Haymakers is an epic—the history of man's struggle with nature as well as man's struggle against machines. It relates the story of farmers and their obligations to their families, to the animals they fed, and to the land they tended. But The Haymakersis also an elegy—to a way of life fast disappearing from our landscape. In the most heartfelt essays, Hoffbeck chronicles his own family's struggle to hold onto th...

"An overview of Chicago's comedic legacy, from its early days . . . to its present day position as a breeding ground for some of comedy's biggest names" ( Gapers Block).Famous for being a city of broad shoulders, Chicago has also developed an international reputation for split sides and slapped knees. Watch the Chicago style of comedy evolve from nineteenth-century vaudeville, through the rebellious comics of the fifties and into the improvisation and sket...

Jefferson City has a unique and enduring legacy of brave individuals banding together to answer the nation�s call to arms. The Missouri National Guard�s Company L, 2nd Infantry mobilized in support of the Mexican Border War in 1916 and later federalized for deployment during the Great War. Local youth scrambled to recruiting stations for a chance to join in the fray against Germany and Japan during World War II. Later, brave residents found themselves in the Korea peninsula or the jungles ...

Automatic gunfire hammered police arriving at Northlake Bank in response to a silent alarm on the morning of October 27, 1967. The shootout killed two officers and injured two others. One of the robbers lay wounded as the other two fled in a getaway car. The ensuing manhunt tore across state lines and thrust the quiet Illinois community into a national debate over rehabilitated prisoners--two of the men were fresh out of jail for bank robbery. Local author Edgar Gamboa Navar traces this vi...

More than a century and a half after its founding, the Iowa State Fair is the state’s central institution, event, and symbol. New Jersey has the Shore; Kentucky has the Derby; Iowa has the Fair. The humble Iowa State Fairground ranks alongside the Great Pyramids at Giza and the Taj Mahal in the best-selling travel guide 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. During its annual run each August, the fair attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors who make the pilgrimage to the fairgroun...

The story of Albert Alonzo "Doc" Ames is perhaps the greatest political scandal in Minnesota history. As mayor of Minneapolis, Ames exposed the city to national humiliation–and helped jump-start an era of reform.At the turn of the twentieth century, Minneapolis was moving away from a time of political rings, frontier justice, and old boys' clubs to a more civic-minded way of governing. But in 1901, the affable, degenerate Doc Ames, a former Minneapolis mayor well past his political...