Category: American History
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America’s Femme Fatale: The Story of Serial Killer Belle Gunness
A Norwegian farm girl, her family so poor, they often went hungry, is seduced by a rich landowner’s son. But despite her dreams, he has no plans to make her his wife. Abandoned, she sees only one path forward or she’ll sink into the black hole of her family’s poverty. But her first goal is…
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Capote’s Women: The Story of the Writers’ Swans
“There are certain women who, though perhaps not born rich, are born to be rich,” author Truman Capote wrote about the beautiful, well-dressed, and style-setting women he called his “swans.” The ultimate arm candy for the wealthiest and most powerful of men, these women of the mid-20th century were trophy wives before the term existed.…
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Pullman: The Man, the Company, the Historic Park by Kenneth Schoon
Kenneth Schoon, professor emeritus at Indiana University Northwest, has immersed himself in the history of the Greater Chicago/Northwest Indiana area for decades, writing books starting from the area’s earliest beginnings such as “Calumet Beginnings: Ancient Shorelines and Settlements at the South End of Lake Michigan” and “Swedish Settlements on the South Shore of Lake…
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Several decades ago, George Saunders and his wife were visiting Washington D.C. when their cousin mentioned that anecdotal evidence indicated President Abraham Lincoln had surreptitiously visited the tomb of his 11-year-old son, Willie. For years, the story of Lincoln, so overcome by grief, that he stole into the monument where his son was interred, nagged…
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Hour of the Witch
“Hour of the Witch,” Chris Bohjalian’s well-researched and chilling new novel, takes us into a past where, just by trying to exercise her independence and desire to lead her own life, a woman could be castigated as a witch.
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Chicago Writer Takes Us Back to the Gilded Age in New Novel
Chicago author Renee Rosen is again taking us on a trip to the past. In her previous novels, she’s explored the city’s jazz roots (Windy City Blues), the Chicago Fire and the founding of the city’s iconic department stores (What the Lady Wants: A Novel of Marshall Field and the Gilded Age), and Prohibition-era…
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Disposing of Modernity: The Archaeology of Garbage and Consumerism during Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair
When Rebecca Graff, a PhD student at the University of Chicago in need of a dissertation, was told by a professor that the view before them from the school’s Ida Noyes Hall was “a hundred years ago the center of the world,” she didn’t see the bucolic splendor of Jackson Park hugging the Lake…
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The Children’s Blizzard: A Historic Novel of the Nebraska Prairie
The week before, they’d been isolated when a snowstorm and cold temperatures forced everyone to stay inside. But that morning Gerta, the young teacher who boarded at the Pedersen’s house, and her student Annette, a waif who had been dropped off at the home by her mother who hadn’t even hugged her goodbye, ran across…
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THE 17TH ANNUAL BEST BOOK AWARDS ANNOUNCE 2020 AWARD RECIPIENTS
Mainstream & Independent Titles Score Top Honors in the 17th Annual Best Book Awards HarperCollins, Penguin/Random House, John Wiley and Sons, Routledge/Taylor and Francis, Forge, Sterling Publishing, Hay House, Sounds True, Llewellyn Worldwide, NYU Press, Oxford University Press, John Hopkins University Press, The White House Historical Association and hundreds of Independent Houses contribute to this…
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“The Belle of Bedford Avenue: The Sensational Brooks-Burns Murder in Turn-of-the-Century New York”
The year was 1902 when Florence Burns, who craved excitement frequented dance halls, drank in roadhouses, and even smoked in public—a truly decadent act, discarded the standards of her well-to-do family to hang with the Bedford Avenue Gang.
Shelf Life 