Stories abound about legendary New York City gangsters like "Lucky" Luciano, but Buffalo has housed its fair share of thugs and mobsters too. While many were nothing more than common criminals or bank robbers, a powerful crime family headed by local boss Stefano Magaddino emerged in the 1920s. Close to Canada, Niagara Falls and Buffalo were perfect avenues through which to transport booze, and Magaddino and his Mafiosi maintained a stranglehold on...

Bestselling classic with historical accounts, full-color vintage images, and a selection of recipes from Pennsylvania's Christmas past Originally published in 1959 and written by one of the seminal figures in American folklife studies, this classic work examines the folk origins of Christmas in the Keystone State. Composed of interviews and contemporary newspaper reports, it records holiday traditions from the eighteenth century through the early...

Georgetown has long been home to the most affluent and influential residents of the capital--but it has also played host to its fair share of high-end misdeeds and wickedly amusing scandals. Culprits range from Confederate spies to the prankster students who stole the clock hands of Georgetown University's Healy Hall, while crime scenes include murder on the C&O Canal and floating brothels on the Potomac. Navigating her way through Cold War-era intrigues...

Birth of the Bravest is a substantially abridged edition of Our Firemen: A History of the New York Fire Departments, Volunteer and Paid by A. E. Costello, which was originally published in 1887. This edition includes all of the revealing historic events and exploits while deleting over 400 pages of lists, inventories, and personnel records. They are called "the Bravest." They are the New York City Fire Department, ordinary men who put themselves...

Soon after Philadelphia began to exploit New Jersey's largest hematite deposit in 1758, Andover Furnace and Forge began producing the best metal in the world. Its product was so desirable that the newly formed American military wrested control from Loyalist owners in 1778. This frontier industrial outpost endured thirty-five years before labor costs, competition from cheap imports, careless consumption of woodlands and difficulty in transporting its...

In all aspects of life, from politics and education to religion and business, the Black Baltimore community has been a leader for civil rights. From the 19th century until the 1970s, Baltimore has been at the forefront of various civil rights movements. Black Baltimoreans helped establish the Niagara Movement, the precursor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and had one of the most active NAACP branches, counting...

High adventure, dastardly deeds, and newly uncovered lore.

In Bronx Faces and Voices, sixteen men and women tell their personal, uncensored stories of the New York City borough-before, during, and after the troubled years of arson, crime, abandonment, and flight in the 1970s and 1980s. The voices in this volume are as eclectic as the Bronx itself: elected officials, religious leaders, and activists who were determined to preserve the beauty of their parks and stability of their community. They had the courage...

In her 1860 book Lichen Tufts, from the Alleghanies, Elizabeth C. Wright weaves together environmental philosophy, lyrical nature writing, and social consciousness. A graduate of Alfred University, Wright was an activist for women's rights, temperance, and the abolition of slavery. She was a teacher, a botanist, and, later in life, a Kansas homesteader. In Lichen Tufts, Wright urged her readers to cultivate an intimate knowledge of the natural world,...

Philadelphia's faded ads are history in plain sight. They are tangible remnants of changing neighborhoods and industries, and Fading Ads of Philadelphia presents a new way to view these forgotten urban stories. Join author and photographer Lawrence O'Toole as he explores these physical touchstones of the city's history--a sign for a bygone family business seen only from the elevated train tracks, the Gretz smokestack advertising the now defunct Kensington...