In Historic Columbus Crimes, the father-daughter team of David Meyers and Elise Meyers Walker looks back at sixteen tales of murder, mystery and mayhem culled from city history. Take the rock star slain by a troubled fan or the drag queen slashed to death by a would-be ninja. Then there's the writer who died acting out the plot of his next book, the minister's wife incinerated in the parsonage furnace and a couple of serial killers who outdid the Son of Sam. Not to mention a gunfight at Broad and High, grave-robbing medical students, the bloodiest day in FBI history and other fascinating stories of crime and tragedy. They're all here, and they're all true

The Jesus People movement of the late 1960s and 1970s was an important force in the lives of millions of American Baby Boomers. This unique combination of the hippie counterculture and evangelical Christianity first appeared amid 1967's famed "Summer of Love" in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district and grew like wildfire in Southern California and in cities like Seattle, Atlanta, and Milwaukee. In 1971 the growing movement found its way into the national spotlight, attracting a great deal of contemporary media and scholarly attention. In the wake of publicity, the movement gained momentum and attracted a huge new following among evangelical church youth who enthusiastically adopted the Jesus People persona as their own. In the process, the movement spread across the country - particularly into the Great Lakes region - and coffeehouses, "Jesus Music" singers, and "One Way" bumper stickers soon blanketed the land. Within a few years, however, the movement faded and disappeared and was largely forgotten by everyone but those who had filled its ranks. God's Forever Family is the first major attempt to re-examine the Jesus People phenomenon in over thirty years. It reveals that it was one of the most important American religious movements of the second half of the 20th-century. Not only did the Jesus movement produce such burgeoning new evangelical groups as Calvary Chapel and the Vineyard movement, but the Jesus People paved the way for the huge Contemporary Christian Music industry and the rise of "Praise Music" in the nation's churches. More significantly, perhaps, it revolutionized evangelicals' relationship with youth and popular culture-important factors in the evangelical subculture's emerging engagement with the larger American culture from the late 1970s forward. God's Forever Family makes the case that the Jesus People movement not only helped create a resurgent evangelicalism but - alongside the hippie counterculture and the student movement - must be considered one of the major formative powers that shaped American youth in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Historians of the Civil Rights Movement have long set their sights on the struggles of African Americans in the South and, more recently, North. In doing so, they either omit the West or merge it with the North, defined as anything outside the former Confederacy. Historians of the American West have long set the region apart from the South and North, citing racial diversity as one of the West's defining characteristics. This book integrates the two, examining the Civil Rights Movement in the West in order to bring the West to the Civil Rights Movement. In particular, it explores the challenge that California's racial diversity posed for building a multiracial civil rights movement, focusing on litigation and legislation initiatives advanced by civil rights reformers (lawyers, legislators, and advocacy organizations) on behalf of the state's different racial groups. A tension between sameness and difference cut through California's civil rights history. On the one hand, the state's civil rights reformers embraced a common goal - equality of opportunity through anti-discrimination litigation and legislation. To this end, they often analogized the plights of racial minorities, accentuating the racism in general that each group faced in order to help facilitate coalition building across groups. This tension - and its implications for the cultivation of a multiracial civil rights movement - manifested itself from the moment that one San Francisco-based NAACP leader expressed his wish for "a united front of all the minority groups" in 1944. Variations proved major enough to force the litigation down discrete paths, reflective of how legalized segregation affected African Americans, Japanese Americans, and Mexican Americans in different ways. This "same but different" tension continued into the 1950s and 1960s, as civil rights reformers ventured down anti-discrimination roads that began where legalized segregation ended. In the end, despite their endorsement of a common goal and calls for a common struggle, California's civil rights reformers managed to secure little coalescence - and certainly nothing comparable to the movement in the South. Instead, the state's civil rights struggles unfolded along paths that were mostly separate. The different axes of racialized discrimination that confronted the state's different racialized groups called forth different avenues of redress, creating a civil rights landscape criss-crossed with color lines rather than bi-sected by any single color line.

The Vietnam War, Oklahoma City bombing, Columbine High School shooting, and attacks of 9/11 all shattered myths of national identity. Vietnam was a war the U.S. didn't win on the ground in Asia or politically at home; Oklahoma City revealed domestic terrorism in the heartland; Columbine debunked legends of high school as an idyllic time; and 9/11 demonstrated U.S. vulnerability to international terrorism. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was intended to separate the victims from the war that caused their death. This focus on individuals lost (evident in all the memorials and museums discussed here) conflates the function of cemeteries, where deaths are singular and grieving is personal, with that of memorials - to remember and mourn communal losses and reflect on national events seen in a larger context. Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11 traces the evolution and consequences of this new hybrid paradigm, which grants a heroic status to victims and by extension to their families, thereby creating a class of privileged participants in the permanent memorial process. It argues against this practice, suggesting instead that victims' families be charged with determining the nature of an interim memorial, one that addresses their needs in the critical time between the murder of their loved ones and the completion of the permanent memorial. It also charges that the memorials discussed here are variously based on strategies of diversion and denial that direct our attention away from actual events, and reframe tragedy as secular or religious triumph. Thus they basically camouflage history. Seen as an aggregate, they define a nation of victims, exactly the concept they and their accompanying celebratory narratives were apparently created to obscure.

Desperate to seize control of Kentucky, the Confederate army launched an invasion into the commonwealth in the fall of 1862, viciously culminating at an otherwise quiet Bluegrass crossroads and forever altering the landscape of the war. The Battle of Perryville lasted just one day yet produced nearly eight thousand combined casualties and losses, and some say nary a victor. The Rebel army was forced to retreat, and the United States kept its imperative grasp on Kentucky throughout the war. Few know this hallowed ground like Christopher L. Kolakowski, former director of the Perryville Battlefield Preservation Association, who draws on letters, reports, memoirs and other primary sources to offer the most accessible and engaging account of the Kentucky Campaign yet, featuring over sixty historic images and maps.

St. Louis was a city under siege during Prohibition. Seven different criminal gangs violently vied for control of the town's illegal enterprises. Although their names (the Green Ones, the Pillow Gang, the Russo Gang, Egan's Rats, the Hogan Gang, the Cuckoo Gang and the Shelton Gang) are familiar to many, their exploits have remained largely undocumented until now. Learn how an awkward gunshot wound gave the Pillow Gang its name, and read why Willie Russo's bizarre midnight interview with a reporter from the St. Louis Star involved an automatic pistol and a floating hunk of cheese. From daring bank robberies to cold-blooded betrayals, The Gangs of St. Louis chronicles a fierce yet juicy slice of the Gateway City's history that rivaled anything seen in New York or Chicago.

Oppaymolleah's curse. General Braddock's buried gold. The Original Man of Steel, Joe Magarac. Such legends have found a home among the rich folklore of Western Pennsylvania. Thomas White spins a beguiling yarn with tales that reach from the misty hollows of the Alleghenies to the lost islands of Pittsburgh. White invites readers to learn the truth behind the urban legend of the Green Man, speculate on the conspiracy surrounding the lost B-25 bomber of Monongahela and shiver over the ghostly lore of Western Pennsylvania.

Much like its muddy riverbanks, the mid-South is flooded with tales of shadowy spirits lurking among us. Beyond the rhythm of the blues and tapping of blue suede shoes is a history steeped in horror. From the restless souls of Elmwood Cemetery to the voodoo vices of Beale Street, phantom hymns of the Orpheum Theatre and Civil War soldiers still looking for a fight, peer beyond the shadows of the city's most historic sites.

Author and lifelong resident Laura Cunningham expertly blends fright with history and presents the ghostly legends from Beale to Bartlett, Germantown to Collierville, in this one-of-a-kind volume no resident or visitor should be without.

Drawing on her work with the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute at Bauder College and Ghost Hounds Paranormal Research Society, elite psychic medium and cold case researcher Reese Christian writes of the tragic past and the haunted present of Greater Atlanta. From Peachtree Street in the heart of downtown to the plantations and battlefields surrounding the city, join her in discovering the twisted histories of some of Atlanta's most infamous landmarks and forgotten moments.