Best of
Local-History

2011

JAWS: Memories from Martha's Vineyard


Matt Taylor - 2011
    Among this virtual army of hometown participants were numerous professional and amateur photographers, each with full access to the production’s inner workings—for the first time ever this compiles their behind-the-scenes photographs and stories into a treasure trove of Jaws rarities. Included are a foreword by director Steven Spielberg, interviews with production designer Joe Alves, screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, location casting director Shari Rhodes, and more, providing an unprecedented all-access pass to the creation of some of the most memorable and terrifying scenes in film history. This unique compendium is the first to focus on the production’s local participants, telling their stories at last.

The Whites of Their Eyes: Bunker Hill, the First American Army, and the Emergence of George Washington


Paul Lockhart - 2011
    In the tradition of David McCullough’s 1776,Lockhart illuminates the Battle of Bunker Hill as a crucial event in thecreation of an American identity, dexterously interweaving the story of thispivotal pitched battle with two other momentous narratives: the creation ofAmerica’s first army, and the rise of the man who led it, George Washington.

The Future Remembered: The 1962 Seattle World's Fair and Its Legacy


Paula BeckerTom Brown - 2011
    

Derelict Paradise: Homelessness and Urban Development in Cleveland, Ohio


Daniel R. Kerr - 2011
    Daniel Kerr shows that homelessness has deep roots in the shifting ground of urban labor markets, social policy, downtown development, the criminal justice system, and corporate power. Rather than being attributable to the illnesses and inadequacies of the unhoused themselves, it is a product of both structural and political dynamics shaping the city. Kerr locates the origins of today's shelter system in the era that followed the massive railroad rebellions of 1877. From that period through the Great Depression, business and political leaders sought to transform downtown Cleveland to their own advantage. As they focused on bringing business travelers and tourists to the city and beckoned upper-income residents to return to its center, they demolished two downtown working-class neighborhoods and institutionalized a shelter system to contain and control the unhoused and unemployed. The precedents from this period informed the strategies of the post–World War II urban renewal era as the "new urbanism" of the late twentieth century. The efforts of the city's elites have not gone uncontested. Kerr documents a rich history of opposition by people at the margins of whose organized resistance and everyday survival strategies have undermined the grand plans crafted by the powerful and transformed the institutions designed to constrain the lives of the homeless.

Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life


Diane Wilson - 2011
    Nearly one hundred and fifty years after the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862, Dakota people are still struggling with the effects of this unimaginable loss.” Among the Dakota, the Beloved Child ceremony marked the special, tender affection that parents felt toward a child whose life had been threatened. In this moving book, author Diane Wilson explores the work of several modern Dakota people who are continuing to raise beloved children: Gabrielle Tateyuskanskan, an artist and poet; Clifford Canku, a spiritual leader and language teacher; Alameda Rocha, a boarding school survivor; Harley and Sue Eagle, Canadian activists; and Delores Brunelle, an Ojibwe counselor. each of these humble but powerful people teaches children to believe in the “genius and brilliance” of Dakota culture as a way of surviving historical trauma. Crucial to true healing, Wilson has learned, is a willingness to begin with yourself. Each of these people works to transform the effects of genocide, restoring a way of life that regards our beloved children as wakan, sacred.   Diane Wilson, director of Dream of Wild Health Farm, is the author of Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past, which won a Minnesota Book award. She is a Mdewakanton descendent; her mother was enrolled on the Rosebud Reservation.

Charlie No Face


David Seaburn - 2011
    Despite nagging questions about the death of his mother when he was an infant, the summer of 1959 is shaping up as the best vacation of Jackie's short life. He has friends, baseball, his father's unanticipated vacation from work, and the hunt for Charlie No Face to fill his days. But in a few short weeks, Jackie's life is turned upside down. He moves in with a distant relative whose shadowy boarder holds the key to Jackie's past and, perhaps, his future. Who is this man who won't go out in the light of day but who roams the woods at night? Could it be? Charlie No Face is a coming-of-age story in which a misunderstood recluse and a young boy redeem each other's lives through a most unlikely friendship.

Generations: 1891 -1940 Living on the Islands of Boston Harbor


Laura Thibodeau Jones - 2011
    August Reekast was a very well know lobster fisherman who lived and worked his trade off Outer Brewster Island; also was a boat Captain for Julia Arthur. Ms. Arthur (an actress in the late 1800's to early 1900's) and her husband Benjamin P. Cheney were the owner's of Calf Island and a beautiful Mansion which overlooked the Harbor. In 1908 the Reekast family lost everything in the Chelsea Massachusetts Fire, having no other option, moved their eight children to the Islands where they rebuilt their lives. In the mid 1900's their son Gus Reekast became caretaker of Calf Island where he and his wife raised their daughter Augusta (Periwinkle). In the early 1920's the Reekast family relocated to N. Weymouth Mass., their home was located on Hunts Hill. During the depression, Ida (Reekast) Knoll and Edmund Knoll brought their two children Christine (knoll) Walsh and Rosemary (Knoll) Thibodeau to live on Great Brewster. The Reekast and Knoll family left a legacy of knowledge, pictures and documents which fill the pages of this book.

Founding St. Louis: First City of the New West


J. Frederick Fausz - 2011
    Historian J. Frederick Fausz offers a fresh interpretation of Saint Louis from 1764 to 1804, explaining how Pierre Lacl de, the early Chouteaus, Saint Ange de Bellerive and the Osage Indians established a "gateway" to an enlightened, alternative frontier of peace and prosperity before Lewis and Clark were even born. Historians, genealogists and general readers will appreciate the well-researched perspectives in this engaging story about a novel French West long ignored in American History.

Dr. Joseph Warren: The Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill, and the Birth of American Liberty


Sam Forman - 2011
    An American doctor, Bostonian, and patriot, Joseph Warren played a central role in the events leading to the American Revolution. This detailed biography of Warren rescues the figure from obscurity and reveals a remarkable revolutionary who dispatched Paul Revere on his famous ride and was the hero of the battle of Bunker Hill, where he was killed in action. Physician to the history makers of early America, political virtuoso, and military luminary, Warren comes to life in this comprehensive biography meticulously grounded in original scholarship.

"The Loveliest Home That Ever Was": The Story of the Mark Twain House in Hartford


Steven Courtney - 2011
    Author Steve Courtney, the organization's Publicist and Publications Editor, conducts a journey back to the Gilded Age, when the celebrated author and humorist was known as Mr. Samuel Clemens of Hartford, Connecticut. Readers can venture inside "the loveliest home that ever was" for an illustrated tour that offers intimate glimpses of the writer, his wife, and their daughters within their Victorian mansion.Abundantly illustrated with architectural drawings and period photos, this volume also features dozens of recent color images. Built in the American Gothic tradition, the richly appointed house features the decorative work of Louis Comfort Tiffany and contains many souvenirs of family trips to Europe. During the seventeen years that he lived in the Hartford home, Sam Clemens completed The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), along with The Prince and the Pauper (1881) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), in addition to countless lectures, magazine pieces, and stories improvised for the children's delight. The narrative traces the house's history beyond the Clemens family's residence, from its 1903 sale to its current status as a lovingly preserved and restored National Historic Landmark.

The Third Crop: a personal and historical journey into the photo albums and shoeboxes of the Slocan Valley, 1800s to early 1940s


Rita Moir - 2011
    Acclaimed Canadian author Rita Moir, who has made her home in the valley since 1975, is one of those people.In her new book The Third Crop, Moir embarks on a personal journey through old photographs and memorabilia of the Slocan Valley found in private albums, dusty shoeboxes and community archives. Along the way, from a perspective that only a long-time local can provide, Moir skilfully and passionately recounts the stories, industry, joys and tragedies of an era that was pivotal in forming the human character and landscape of the Slocan Valley as it is today.The Third Crop serves a visual feast to lovers of the province’s history, with more than 160 historic photographs beautifully juxtaposed with contemporary images of the valley. Moir’s insights into the history of a place she deeply loves and respects, and her reflections on her experiences living there, are a significant contribution to understanding this vibrant part of British Columbia.

El Paso's Manhattan Heights


Craig M. Peters - 2011
    By 1912, however, the smelter was closed and demolished. Shortly thereafter, four of the five parcels of land originally owned by the smelter were purchased to build what many considered to be El Paso's first suburban neighborhood. The first house was built in 1914, with many more to follow, representing Spanish, Georgian, and Moderne architectural styling of the times. With the construction of Manhattan Heights School and Veterans Memorial Park, the small district covering 1,910 acres attracted many of El Paso's prominent citizens.

Vancouver Noir: 1930-1960


John Belshaw - 2011
    Photography. Vancouver Sun books list: "30 best reads from B.C. and beyond." It was an era of gambling, smuggling rings, grifters, police corruption, bootleggers, brothels, murders, and more. It was also a time of intensified concern with order, conformity, structure, and restrictions. VANCOUVER NOIR provides a fascinating insight into life in the Terminal City, noir-style.These are visions of the city, both of what it was and what some of its citizens hoped it would either become or conversely cease to be. The photographs most of which look like stills from period movies featuring detectives with chiselled features, tough women, and bullet-ridden cars speak to the styles of the Noir era and tell us something special about the ways in which a city is made and unmade. The authors argue that noir-era values and perspectives are to be found in the photographic record of the city in this era, specifically in police and newspaper pictures. These photographs document changing values by emphasizing behaviours and sites that were increasingly viewed as deviant by the community's elite. They chart an age of rising moral panics. Public violence, smuggling rings, police corruption, crime waves, the sex trade, and the glamorization of sex in burlesques along and nearby Granville Street's neon alley belonged to an array of public concerns against which media and political campaigns were repeatedly launched. "VANCOUVER NOIR: City comes of age in fascinating text City outgrew its steam-age industrial economy, but the changes didn't come easily or overnight This is a book about working-class Vancouver in the three decades between, say, the opening of the Marine Building in 1930 and the death, in 1959, of Errol Flynn, in the arms of his teenage girlfriend after an enthusiastic evening at the Penthouse Cabaret on Seymour Street. "It's illustrated with about 150 maps and black-and-white photos, including shots of murder victims and other crime scenes: the sort of images that always contain a great deal of visual information." Vancouver Sun "Much like a ride on the Giant Dipper rollercoaster at Happyland (the 1930s precursor to Playland), VANCOUVER NOIR is chock full of informative thrills, spills, and chills." BC Studies "The atmosphere of the mean streets is conveyed in the book's many photographs: black-and-white images of rain-slick pavement, crime scenes, nightclubs, mobsters and hookers VANCOUVER NOIR retrieves this disreputable side of the city's history and presents it in all its black-and-white glory." Geist"

Dakota Dawn: The Decisive First Week of the Sioux Uprising, August 17-24, 1862


Gregory F. Michno - 2011
    The vortex of the Dakota Uprising along the Minnesota River encompassed thousands of people in what was perhaps the greatest massacre of whites by Indians in American history. To read about the fast paced and unpredictable flood of killing and destruction is to discover heartrending emotion, irony, tragedy, cowardice, and heroism from unexpected quarters. Previous attempts to sort out individual experiences and place the events in a coherent chronological and geographical order have enjoyed little success. Award-winning author Gregory F. Michno's Dakota Dawn: The Decisive First Week of the Sioux Uprising, August 17-24, 1862 offers an essential clarity and vivid portrait that readers will find refreshing and invigorating.Dakota Dawn focuses in great detail on the first week of the killing spree, a great paroxysm of destruction when the Dakota succeeded, albeit fleetingly, in driving out the white man. During those seven days at least 400 white settlers were killed, the great majority innocent victims slaughtered in the most shocking manner. Nowhere else in the Western United States was there a record of such sustained attacks against a fort (Ridgely) or upon a town (New Ulm). After soldiers put down the uprising, hundreds of Dakotas were captured and put before military tribunals with little or no opportunity to present a fair defense; 38 were hanged on one massive gallows on December 26, 1862.Michno's research includes select secondary studies and 2,000 pages of primary sources including recollections, original records, diaries, newspaper accounts, and other archival records. One seldom used resource is the Indian Depredation Claim files. After the uprising, settlers filed nearly 3,000 claims for damages in which they itemized losses and set forth their experiences. These priceless documents paint firsthand slices of the life of a frontier people, their cabins, tools, clothes, crops, animals, and cherished possessions. Many of these claims have never been incorporated into a book; Michno's use of them allows him to more fully expound on various episodes and correct previous misconceptions.Richly illustrated with 42 contemporary and modern photos and illustrations and accompanied by 19 original maps, Dakota Dawn now stands as the definitive account of one of the most important and previously misunderstood events in American history.About the Author: Award-winning author Gregory F. Michno is a Michigan native and the author of three dozen articles and ten books dealing with World War II and the American West, including Lakota Noon; Battle at Sand Creek; The Encyclopedia of Indian Wars; The Deadliest Indian War in the West; and Circle the Wagons. Greg helped edit and appeared in the DVD history The Great Indian Wars: 1540-1890. He lives in Colorado, with his wife Susan.

Cuyahoga County: The First 200 Years


Judith G. Cetina - 2011
    From the county's creation in 1808, to the World War II era and beyond, Cuyahoga County was transformed from a frontier community into a vibrant urban center. Today this part of northeastern Ohio is envied for its distinctive neighborhoods, embrace of various religious creeds, resilient entrepreneurship, ethnically and racially diverse population, political leadership, recreational facilities, splendid cultural and educational institutions, storied sports franchises, and distinguished health facilities. Cuyahoga County government and its citizens are also renowned for their philanthropy and concern for those most vulnerable; championing ideals that ensure everyone an equal place at the table and freedom everywhere. This worldview was rooted in the actions of those who, throughout the centuries, risked their lives and fortunes to attain these goals, giving greater meaning to the area's Underground Railroad code name: HOPE.

Wicked Ottawa County, Michigan


Amberrose Hammond - 2011
    The lovers you find here become enemies, and the jilted, jealous and mistreated favor weaponry to verbal resolution. Ku Klux Klan members don white gowns and leave fiery crosses blazing against the backdrop of night. In this Ottawa County, Eddie Bentz, Baby Face Nelson and a crew of thugs are spraying machine gun fire outside the People's Savings Bank in Grand Haven, arguments end in miserable fashion and the missing often turn up without the capacity to out their wrongdoers.