Ancient human groups in the Eastern Woodlands of North America were long viewed as homogeneous and stable hunter-gatherers, changing little until the late prehistoric period when Mesoamerican influences were thought to have stimulated important economic and social developments. The authors in this volume offer new, contrary evidence to dispute this earlier assumption, and their studies demonstrate the vigor and complexity of prehistoric peoples in the North American Midwest and Midsouth. T...

Who doesnt love a good homicide? Murders, Mysteries and History pulls 150 years of forgotten crimes straight from the pages of yesterdays news and stirs them in a historical mix to produce a book like no other. Get the scoop on more than a hundred real-life murders and unsolved killings. Vics, suspects, perps. Judges and juries. Jails and penitentiaries. Hangings, electrocutions and nothing less than simply getting away with murder. Sometimes brutal, often haunting, always entertaining. Mu...

Revolutions, native conspiracies and subsequent insurrections, filthy mountain men sleeping on the dirt and wrestling with grizzlies, radical priests, belligerent American soldiers, betrayal, violence, early forms of commerce, and other enthralling accounts are part of this small New Mexico town’s history. Complete with illustrations and archived photographs, “Turbulent Taos” is Den Galbraith’s groundbreaking examination of Taos’s wild past in its pre to post territorial days. Informative ...

This book is for those Louisiana slaves (and all the American slaves) whose labor was forced without regard to their humanity, even further, with unrestrained disrespect for their existence. This book is a tribute to the indigenous (originated in or native to the region) Black people of Northeast Louisiana, those folk who were reared in the rural areas, villages, and small towns; who worked on the farms and plantations; sharecropped; cleared all the land; tended all the livestock; planted ...

On January 27, 1951, the first atomic weapon was detonated over a section of desert known as Frenchman Flat in southern Nevada, providing dramatic evidence of the Nevada Test Site's beginnings. Fifty years later, author A. Costandina Titus reviews contemporary nuclear policy issues concerning the continued viability of that site for weapons testing. Titus has updated her now-classic study of atomic testing with fifteen years of political and cultural history, from the mid-1980s Reagan-Gorb...

The dramatic story of the oil boom that transformed the history of a state, drawn from archives and first-person accounts.As the twentieth century began, oil in Texas was easy to find, but the quantities were too small to attract industrial capital and production. Then, on January 10, 1901, the Spindletop gusher blew in. Over the next fifty years, oil transformed Texas, creating a booming economy that built cities, attracted out-of-state workers and companies, fund...

The Kinzua Dam has cast a long shadow on Seneca life since World War II. The project, formally dedicated in 1966, broke the Treaty of Canandaigua of 1794, flooded approximately 10,000 acres of Seneca lands in New York and Pennsylvania, and forced the relocation of hundreds of tribal members. Hauptman offers both a policy study, detailing how and why Washington, Harrisburg, and Albany came up with the idea to build the dam, and a community study of the Seneca Nation in the postwar era. Alth...

"Families only."Those who were killed on September 11, 2001 left behind more than family members. They left thousands of friends who are often forgotten and ignored: co-workers, first responders, neighbors and survivors who struggle to find a way to grieve the friends killed when the World Trade Center towers fell.In Friend Grief and 9/11: The Forgotten Mourners you'll learn how they adjust to life without their friends and find ways to honor those they lost on a c...

This manuscript is a collection of short stories that were originally prepared as part of a radio program that began in the early 1980s as a summer informational and educational program for Tahoe area residents and visitors. Between 1982 and 1985, the author presented over a hundred live radio features about Tahoes history and the environment over Tahoe radio station KTHO. Lane returned to the radio airways in 1995, this time with Tahoe radio station KOWL-AM-1490, and has since broadcast o...

Renowned for his fierce devotion to the people of Texas—as well as his equally fierce rages and unpredictable temper—Bob Bullock was the most powerful political figure in Texas at the end of the twentieth century. First elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1956, Bullock held several key statewide posts before capturing the lieutenant governor's office in 1990. Though nominally the state's number two official, Bullock in fact became Texas's top power broker, wielding tremendous ...

If there was any man qualified to write a history of the bloody state of Kansas in the 1860s, it was Sam Crawford. He lived an extraordinary life as a Kansas legislator, a general in the American Civil War, and 3rd governor of the State of Kansas.Anyone who includes a subheading of "Farming with Dynamite" in their book has our vote.Crawford was a fervently "free-state" Kansas man, opposing slavery entirely and its introduction into Kansas. Bleeding Kansas was a flash-point ...

Between 1873 and 1935, reformers in Chicago used the power of music to unify the diverse peoples of the metropolis. These musical progressives emphasized the capacity of music to transcend differences among various groups. Sounds of Reform looks at the history of efforts to propagate this vision and the resulting encounters between activists and ethnic, immigrant, and working-class residents.Musical progressives sponsored free concerts and music lessons at neighborhood par...