Best of
Local-History

1990

Murder of Innocence: The Tragic Life and Final Rampage of Laurie Dann


Joel Kaplan - 1990
    Driven by fear and hate, she was going to make something terrible happen. Before the end of the day, Dann had blazed a murderous trail of poison, fire, and bullets through the unsuspecting town of Winnetka, Illinois, and other North Shore suburbs. She murdered an eight-year-old boy and critically wounded 5 other children inside an elementary school. It finally took a massed force of armed police to end the killing. The shocking story of innocence destroyed by a rich young babysitter inexplicably gone mad made headlines all across the nation and inspired at least two psychotic killers to follow her example. What lead her to do it? Could she have been stopped? The case raised a host of agonizing questions that have remained unanswered—until now. In this book, three Chicago Tribune reporters who covered the Laurie Dann tragedy have pulled together all the available police evidence, unearthed valuable psychiatric information, and interviewed at length scores of people who knew Dann, many of whom had never before spoken to the media about this case. Despite clear and ominous warning signs, a young woman of beauty and privilege was allowed to deteriorate and go slowly berserk—and no one stopped her. Her parents, her doctors, and the police officers who knew her pathological behavior all failed her at critical times. By its passivity and silence, a community comfortable and quiet on the surface, yet reluctant to admit its underlying flaws, became an unwitting accomplice to the final rampage of Laurie Dann. MURDER OF INNOCENCE is a searing portrayal of a family—and a society—unable to cope, and of a young woman who wanted all too desperately only to be loved.

Distant Fires


Scott D. Anderson - 1990
    Describes the author's three month canoe adventure, which started at Duluth, Minnesota and ended at York Factory on the shores of Hudson Bay.

Liverpool


Peter Aughton - 1990
    From its warm, tough, always-beating heart come people renowned for their friendliness, wit, resilience and strength of character. Throughout its long and surprisingly varied history Liverpool has engendered fierce loyalty from its citizens, and captivated even the most casual of visitors. This book traces the growth of the city from a little fishing village on the banks of the Mersey all the way from its foundation in 1207 to the proud European Capital of Culture 800 years later. Combining good historical research with a lively, fresh and highly accessible style, Peter Aughton describes every stage of Liverpool's remarkable town, its unprecedented growth as the major seaport for the world's first industrial society, its role in a mass history: from its origins as a tiny port in the tidal inlet known as the 'Liver Pool', to the horrors of the slave trade, the building of the world's first ever public railway, its brief spell in the eighteenth century as a fashionable spa emigration movement that saw perhaps as many as nine million souls depart from its quaysides for a better life in the New World, the devastation to docks, public buildings and houses caused during the terrible Blitz in 1941, the Mersey Sound which now draws thousands of visitors from around the world, right up to the recent renaissance of the town's fortunes which has culminated in the European Capital of Culture bid success. This is a truly fascinating story.

Ghosts of Tidewater


L.B. Taylor Jr. - 1990
    

Steelton: Immigration and Industrialization, 1870–1940


John E. Bodnar - 1990
    Comprised primarily of Southern blacks and Eastern European immigrants, they formed the lower class of this town.  Analyzes the social structure and dominance of the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant elite.

El Paso: A Borderlands History


Wilbert H. Timmons - 1990
    Central to the work art the two cultural traditions, - the Spanish Mexican North and the comparatively new Anglo-American Southwest. (Description by http-mart)