From the days of "bucket brigades" and private volunteer companies--such as the Phoenix, the Axemen and the Eagle--Charleston has seen more than its fair share of conflagrations. A carelessly overturned candle could ignite a blaze that would consume hundreds of Charleston's closely built wooden structures within just a few hours, leaving large swaths of the city in ruins. Join Charleston native and local historian Danny Crooks as he relates the story of Charleston's many historic fires and...

Bestselling author Douglas Preston selects the best true crime writing from the past year, aided by series editor Pete Crooks, to produce an eclectic collection of intriguing, mysterious, and exciting true tales.This inaugural edition of what will be a yearly collection offers a fascinating variety of essays and crime reporting, taken from regional, national, and international publications. The stories range from reports of homicide at a Toronto massage parlor to b...

A harrowing, in-depth account of a black man's wrongful conviction and execution for a white man's murder in Jim Crow South Carolina.June 1910, Charleston, South Carolina. A Jewish merchant, Max Lubelsky, lay murdered in his clothing store on Upper King Street. Daniel "Nealy" Duncan, the black man eventually convicted of the crime was arrested several weeks later as an angry mob called for his lynching. What followed became the story of one man's quiet protestation...

**The inspiration for the Netflix series Death by Lightning – now streaming! • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The extraordinary account of James Garfield's rise from poverty to the American presidency, and the dramatic history of his assassination and legacy, from the bestselling author of The River of Doubt."Crisp, concise and revealing history.... A fresh narrative that plumbs some of the most dramatic days in U.S. presidential history." —The Washingt...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • This groundbreaking historical expose unearths the lost stories of enslaved persons and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude shortly thereafter in “The Age of Neoslavery.”By turns moving, sobering, and shocking, this unprecedented Pulitzer Prize-winning account reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of h...

"It's history that reads like a race-against-the-clock thriller." — Harlan CobenDaniel Stashower, the two-time Edgar award–winning author of The Beautiful Cigar Girl, uncovers the riveting true story of the "Baltimore Plot," an audacious conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln on the eve of the Civil War in THE HOUR OF PERIL.In February of 1861, just days before he assumed the presidency, Abraham Lincoln faced a "clear and...

Named a New York Times Notable BookNamed A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction BookBestselling author Tony Horwitz tells the electrifying tale of the daring insurrection that put America on the path to bloody war.Plotted in secret, launched in the dark, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was a pivotal moment in U.S. history. But few Americans know the true story of the men and women who launched a desperat...

This extraordinary New York Times bestseller reexamines a pivotal event of the civil rights movement—the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till—“and demands that we do the one vital thing we aren’t often enough asked to do with history: learn from it” (The Atlantic).* A New York Times Notable Book * A Washington Post Notable Book * Longlisted for the National Book Award * Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award

The “riveting”* true story of the fiery summer of 1970, which would forever transform the town of Oxford, North Carolina—a classic portrait of the fight for civil rights in the tradition of To Kill a Mockingbird*Chicago TribuneOn May 11, 1970, Henry Marrow, a twenty-three-year-old black veteran, walked into a crossroads store owned by Robert Teel and came out running. Teel and two of his sons chased and beat Marrow, then k...

This sensitively told tale of suffering, brutality, and inhumanity explores an epic history of race and punishment in the deepest South from emancipation to the Civil Rights Era—and beyond.Immortalized in blues songs and movies like Cool Hand Luke and The Defiant Ones, Mississippi’s infamous Parchman State Penitentiary was synonymous with cruelty. Now, noted historian David Oshinsky gives us the true story of the notorious prison, drawing on polic...

The very letters of the two words seem, as they are written, to redden with the blood-stains of unavenged crime. There is Murder in every syllable, and Want, Misery and Pestilence take startling form and crowd upon the imagination as the pen traces the words." So wrote a reporter about Five Points, the most infamous neighborhood in nineteenth-century America, the place where "slumming" was invented.All but forgotten today, Five Points was once renowned the world ov...

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (1862–1931) was an American educator, investigative journalist, and leading figure of the civil rights movement. Having been born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Wells was freed in 1862 during the American Civil War by the Emancipation Proclamation. From then on she dedicated her life as a free woman to fighting prejudice and violence, founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and becoming the most famous African American of ...