Enter Somerville, a city packed with stories larger than itself, to salute a heritage that justifies the fierce pride of its citizens. Share a perch on one of Somerville's celebrated hills with Dee Morris and Dora St. Martin and watch the raising of America's first flag and the stringing of its first telephone line. Strolling from neighborhood to neighborhood, this brief history knocks on the doors of everyone from the father of Fenway Park to Missy LeHand, Franklin D. Roosevelt s private ...

Since its early days in the possession of a man who never set foot on the land itself, Medford has been a place of possibility. Many Medford residents have made their mark on American culture, including James W. Tufts, the inventor of the soda fountain, and Fannie Farmer, author of the first modern cookbook. Medford has been the site of revolutionary changes, as entrepreneur Thatcher Magoun built the wildly successful clipper ship industry, and in the case of Belinda Royall, a slave who re...

An insider’s record of the St. Augustine Civil Rights drama.This memoir recounts the struggle against segregation in St. Augustine, Florida, in the early and mid-1960s. In the summer of 1964 the nation’s oldest city became the center of the civil rights movement as Martin Luther King Jr., encouraged by President Johnson, a southerner, who made the civil rights bill the center piece of his domestic policy, chose this tourism-driven community as an ideal loc...

Once the center of agricultural prosperity in Alabama, the rich soil of the Black Belt still features beautiful homes that stand as a testimony to the region�s proud heritage. Join author Jennifer Hale as she explores the history of seventeen of the finest plantation homes in Alabama�s Black Belt. This book chronicles the original owners and slaves of the homes, and traces their descendants who continued to call these plantations home throughout the past two centuries. Discover why the fam...

The name "Luneburg" was coined for King George II of England, who was also the duke of Luneburg, Germany, in 1727. The final name, Lunenburg, was probably a result of misspelling in the early records of the town. On August 1, 1728, Lunenburg was officially granted township but, as early as 1726, a variety of industries had been started and twenty-six houses had been built. In the late nineteenth century, the town returned to predominately agriculture and, today, is a rural residential comm...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • An unprecedented examination of how news stories, editorials and photographs in the American press—and the journalists responsible for them—profoundly changed the nation’s thinking about civil rights in the South during the 1950s and ‘60s.Roberts and Klibanoff draw on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen—black and white—revealed to a nation its most ...

During the 1930s in the United States, the Works Progress Administration developed the Federal Writers’ Project to support writers and artists while making a national effort to document the country’s shared history and culture. The American Guide series consists of individual guides to each of the states. Little-known authors-many of whom would later become celebrated literary figures-were commissioned to write these important books. John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ral...

The first settlers came to the Brockport area soon after 1800. Located some twenty miles west of Rochester, the towns of Sweden and Clarkson, the village of Brockport, and a college were organized between 1814 and 1835. The Erie Canal, farm implement manufacturing, and higher education fostered their growth and prosperity in the mid-1800s. At Brockport, the United States became a continental nation, the Industrial Revolution came to agriculture, and popular literature came to American wome...

The violent history of the Ku Klux Klan from its formation in post civil war 1865, through its two revival eras of the 1920s, when one in four American men were Klansmen. Its demise and rebirth in the 50s,60s and 70s with the civil rights movement, through to what the organization is now and its activities in the 2010s

Inns and taverns occupied a position of central importance in colonial American society. Rest stop, hotel, provisioning center, drinking saloon, dining establishment, center of news and gossip, quartering for soldiers'these retreats served an astonishing variety of roles. In Colonial Inns and Taverns of Bucks County, author Marie Duess filters the colonial andearly modern history of Bucks County through the area's wide array of stagecoach stops, grog shops and taprooms. These inns created ...

Three cheers for the red, white, and bloopers . . . A US treasury of gaffes, goofs, and weird White House trivia!If they advertised the job opening for President of the United States, the ad would be pretty short. The only basic requirements are to be a natural-born American citizen and at least thirty-five years old. Now you can learn about some of the successful applicants in this special "Chief Executive" edition of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader!...

“Right out of the pages of our lives…Compelling portraits placed in the excitement of a period when oppressed and powerless people moving together changed themselves and their country profoundly and permanently.” —The New York Times Book ReviewThe essential moments of the Civil Rights Movement are set in historical context by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the magisterial America in the King Years trilogy.A masterpiece of sto...