Local History

Photographs and stories that explore the people and landscapes of small-town Texas

An in-depth look at Iona's economic and social history during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Jake Morris-Campbell sets out on a pilgrimage from Lindisfarne to Durham Cathedral, exploring thirteen-hundred years of social change and asking what stories the North East can tell about itself in the wake of Christianity and coal. -- .

Walk Her Way New York City is a collection of 10 curated walking tours through New York neighborhoods, each celebrating the city's history and the women that have made their mark here. Authors Jana Mader and Kaitlyn Allen have meticulously researched and traced the city blocks, uncovering important landmarks, events and women's stories, both well-known and forgotten, to create a series of fun and eye-opening walks that connect you to the city that surrounds you. Featuring beautiful illustrated maps and portraits by Aja O'Han, each walk covers a different neighborhood, including Brooklyn Heights and Dumbo, Central Park, Chelsea, Chinatown, East Side, Greenwich Village, Harlem, Midtown, Roosevelt Island, and SoHo. The walks can be done individually or paired together for an ultimate walking history lesson. While some stops along the walks are worth an extended visit, such as a museum, others are marked as “on the way.” All include significant landmarks of women's history, some of them not yet memorialized. The stories and events of famous and lesser-known women come alive within the pages of the book and on each street corner, as readers can walk in the steps of this diverse set of creative women.

Lumberjacks: the men, the myth, and the making of an American legend The folk hero Paul Bunyan, burly, bearded, wielding his big ax, stands astride the story of the upper Midwest—a manly symbol of the labor that cleared the vast north woods for the march of industrialization while somehow also maintaining an aura of pristine nature. This idea, celebrated in popular culture with songs and folktales, receives a long overdue and thoroughly revealing correction in Gentlemen of the Woods, a cultural history of the life and lore of the real lumberjack and his true place in American history. Now recalled as heroes of wilderness and masculinity, lumberjacks in their own time were despised as amoral transients. Willa Hammitt Brown shows that nineteenth-century jacks defined their communities of itinerant workers by metrics of manhood that were abhorrent to the residents of the nearby Northwoods boomtowns, valuing risk-taking and skill rather than restraint and control. Reviewing songs, stories, and firsthand accounts from loggers, Brown brings to life the activities and experiences of the lumberjacks as they moved from camp to camp. She contrasts this view with the popular image cultivated by retreating lumber companies that had to sell off utterly barren land. This mythologized image glorified the lumberjack and evoked a kindly, flannel-wearing, naturalist hero. Along with its portrait of lumberjack life and its analysis of the creation of lumberjack myth, Gentlemen of the Woods offers new insight into the intersections of race and social class in the logging enterprise, considering the actual and perceived roles of outsider lumberjacks and Native inhabitants of the northern forests. Anchored in the dual forces of capitalism and colonization, this lively and compulsively readable account offers a new way to understand a myth and history that has long captured our collective imagination.

In 1973, McComb, Mississippi, emerged from a troubled era of the civil rights movement as a small town ready to move past Jim Crow laws and segregation. Young families began to settle in the southwest Mississippi community, including one such family from Oklahoma, Larry and Pat Hicks, and their two young sons, Clark and Matt. Life in the 1970s and 80s in a quaint Southern hamlet became a breeding ground for stories of wit and charm. In the early 1990s, oldest son Clark married his high school sweetheart. The newlyweds moved eighty miles east to Hattiesburg, a thriving mid-size college town where a new generation of Hicks boys were born and raised. The expanded family in the "Hub City" of southeast Mississippi nestled into the fabric of a rapidly changing Southern culture, where tradition and technology created a fertile environment for storytelling reminiscent of an age long ago. Part memoir, part history, the book consists of short story vignettes sure to entertain all readers, particularly those who have connections to the Magnolia State.

This book is both a guide and a history, exploring the curious and entertaining glories of Oxford through two of the most famous fantasies in world literature.

Fish don't heed state boundaries, nor does this comprehensive, photo-filled guide to the diverse species of Chicago and beyond. Encompassing southern Lake Michigan, northeastern Illinois, and adjacent areas of Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the Chicago Region is home to rare habitats supporting diverse fish populations. From small creeks to large rivers, and small ponds to one of the world's largest freshwater ecosystems, Lake Michigan, these systems are home to some 164 fish species representing 31 families. We meet them all--lampreys, sturgeon, paddlefish, gars, drum, darters, perches, sticklebacks, sculpins, and more--in this book, the most complete and up-to-date reference for fishes in the Chicago Region. Written by leading local ecologists, and featuring a pictorial family key, color photographs, and detailed distribution maps for each species, as well as natural history summaries with observations unique to the region, this go-to guide belongs on the shelf--and in the boat--of every angler, naturalist, fisheries manager, and biologist.