Montevallo: a mountain in a valley. This bucolic, natural phrase aptly describes the beauty of this central Alabama town. Early settlers were drawn to the area by its abundant agricultural and mineral resources, and in 1826, the tiny village of Montevallo was born. The nature of the town changed significantly in 1896 with the founding of the Alabama Girls' Industrial School, now the University of Montevallo. The Olmsted Brothers firm of Brookline, Massachusetts, laid out the central campus, and its master plan still inspires current development. Since 1896, the focus of the town has shifted from agriculture and mining to education. The university's mission is to be Alabama's "Public Liberal Arts College." Prominent figures include writer and veteran E. B. Sledge, actresses Polly Holiday and Rebecca Luker, and Major League Baseball player Rusty Greer.

On February 13, 2003, a plane carrying three American military contractors crash-landed in the jungle-covered mountains of Colombia. Within minutes, FARC guerrillas swarmed the wreckage and killed the American pilot and a Colombian crew member, then marched the survivors--Marc Gonsalves, Keith Stansell, and Thomas Howes--at gunpoint into the rain forest. The Colombian government sent 147 soldiers to rescue the Americans. The troops spent weeks subsisting on monkey meat and Amazon rodents as they chased the guerrillas deeper into the jungle. But then a soldier on a bathroom break stuck his machete into the ground and pulled out 20 million pesos--part of a buried rebel cache of $20 million--and the game suddenly changed.

Veteran journalist John Otis places the Colombian hostage story in its full context, exploring the inner workings of the FARC, the U.S.-backed war on drugs, and Colombia's efforts to free the rebel-held prisoners. Law of the Jungle is an edge-of-your-seat adventure and a shocking cautionary tale about the pursuit of fortune in one of the world's most dangerous places.

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

While today's Telluride might bring to mind a hot tourist spot and upscale ski resort, the earliest days of the town and surrounding San Miguel County were marked by an abundance of gamblers, con men and murderers. From Bob Meldrum, a deputized killer who prowled the streets during times of labor unrest, to the author's own ancestor, Charlie Turner, a brash young man killed in a shooting in Ophir, Carol Turner's Notorious Telluride offers a glimpse at some of the sordid, shocking and sad pioneer tales of the area.

"For readers interested in Red Power, Brown Power, women's liberation, peace movements, queer politics, and the white left, this important volume offers new perspectives and information that is not available elsewhere. The essays, by a mix of emerging scholars and scholar-activists, offer views of the recent past that should reshape the consensus about the 1970s to focus on activism, organizing, and violence from above and below." -Felicia Kornbluh, author of The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America "Important and insightful, The Hidden 1970s boldly reimagines a decade that remains understudied and misunderstood." -Peniel E. Joseph, author of Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America The 1970s were a complex, multilayered, and critical part of a long era of profound societal change. Indeed, several iconic events of "the sixties" occurred in the ten years that followed. The Hidden 1970s explores the distinctiveness of those years, a time when radicals tried to change the world as the world changed around them. This powerful collection is a compelling assessment of a wide variety of left-wing social movements during the period that many have described as dominated by conservatism or confusion. Contributors examine critical and largely buried legacies of the 1970s. Their essays provide fascinating insight into the myriad ways that radical social movements shaped American political culture in the 1970s and how they continue to do so today. Dan Berger is the author of Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity and the coeditor of Letters from Young Activists.

Some Americans cling desperately to the myth that we are living in a post-racial society, that the election of the first black president spelled the doom of racism. In fact, racist thought is alive and well in America--more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, if we have any hope of grappling with this stark reality, we must first understand how racist ideas were developed, disseminated, and enshrined in American society. In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. Stamped from the Beginning uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to offer a window into the contentious debates between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and antiracists. From Puritan minister Cotton Mather to Thomas Jefferson, from fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to brilliant scholar W.E.B. Du Bois to legendary anti-prison activist Angela Davis, Kendi shows how and why some of our leading pro-slavery and pro-civil rights thinkers have challenged or helped cement racist ideas in America. Contrary to popular conceptions, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Instead, they were devised and honed by some of the most brilliant minds of each era. These intellectuals used their brilliance to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial disparities in everything from wealth to health. And while racist ideas are easily produced and easily consumed, they can also be discredited. In shedding much-needed light on the murky history of racist ideas, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose them--and in the process, gives us reason to hope.

When Hegel described the Americas as an inferior continent, he was repeating a contention that inspired one of the most passionate debates of modern times. Originally formulated by the eminent natural scientist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon and expanded by the Prussian encyclopedist Cornelius de Pauw, this provocative thesis drew heated responses from politicians, philosophers, publicists, and patriots on both sides of the Atlantic. The ensuing polemic reached its apex in the latter decades of the eighteenth century and is far from extinct today.
Translated in 1973, "The Dispute of the New World "is the definitive study of this debate. Antonello Gerbi scrutinizes each contribution to the debate, unravels the complex arguments, and reveals their inner motivations. As the story of the polemic unfolds, moving through many disciplines that include biology, economics, anthropology, theology, geophysics, and poetry, it becomes clear that the subject at issue is nothing less than the totality of the Old World versus the New, and how each viewed the other at a vital turning point in history.

A gripping and sensational tale of violence, alcohol, and taxes, "The Whiskey Rebellion "uncovers the radical eighteenth-century people's movement, long ignored by historians, that contributed decisively to the establishment of federal authority.
In 1791, on the frontier of western Pennsylvania, local gangs of insurgents with blackened faces began to attack federal officials, beating and torturing the tax collectors who attempted to collect the first federal tax ever laid on an American product--whiskey. To the hard-bitten people of the depressed and violent West, the whiskey tax paralyzed their rural economies, putting money in the coffers of already wealthy creditors and industrialists. To Alexander Hamilton, the tax was the key to industrial growth. To President Washington, it was the catalyst for the first-ever deployment of a federal army, a military action that would suppress an insurgency against the American government.
With an unsparing look at both Hamilton and Washington, journalist and historian William Hogeland offers a provocative, in-depth analysis of this forgotten revolution and suppression. Focusing on the battle between government and the early-American evangelical movement that advocated western secession, "The Whiskey Rebellion "is an intense and insightful examination of the roots of federal power and the most fundamental conflicts that ignited--and continue to smolder--in the United States.

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.

The leader of the student uprising of 1968 and founding member of the notorious Weather Underground tells his story--for the first time

In 1968, Mark Rudd led the legendary occupation of five buildings at Columbia University, a dramatic act of protest against the university's support for the Vietnam War and its institutional racism. Rudd was the charismatic chairman of the Columbia chapter of SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, the largest radical student organization in the United States. After a violent police bust, the Columbia occupation turned into a student strike that closed down the entire campus, turning Rudd into a national symbol of student revolt. Rudd went on to become the cofounder of the Weatherman faction of SDS, which took control of the student organization and helped organize the notorious Days of Rage in Chicago in 1969.

But Mark Rudd wanted revolution.

Rudd and his friends sought to end war, racism, and injustice--by any means necessary, even violence. After a tragic turn that led to the death of three people, who were killed when the bombs they were making in a Greenwich Village town house exploded, they transformed themselves into the Weather Underground Organization. By the end of 1970, after a string of nonlethal bombings by the organization, Rudd, now one of the FBI's Most Wanted, went into hiding for more than seven years before turning himself in to great media fanfare.

In this gripping narrative, Rudd speaks out about this tumultuous period, the role he played in its crucial events, and its aftermath, revealing the drama and tension, as well as the naivete of young activists, fighting in the name of peace and social justice, who believed that their actions mattered.

"I've spoken and answered questions at scores of colleges, high schools, community centers, and theaters about why my friends and I opted for violent revolution, and how I've changed my thinking and how I haven't, and most of all, about the parallels between then and now," Rudd writes. Powerful and shocking, "Underground" sheds new light on this controversial time, which still haunts the nation.

"Accommodating Revolutions "addresses a controversy of long standing among historians of eighteenth-century America and Virginia--the extent to which internal conflict and/or consensus characterized the society of the Revolutionary era. In particular, it emphasizes the complex and often self-defeating actions and decisions of dissidents and other non-elite groups. By focusing on a small but significant region, Tillson elucidates the multiple and interrelated sources of conflict that beset Revolutionary Virginia, but also explains why in the end so little changed.

In the Northern Neck--the six-county portion of Virginia's Tidewater lying between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers--Tillson scrutinizes a wealthy and powerful, but troubled, planter elite, which included such prominent men as George Washington, Richard Henry Lee, Landon Carter, and Robert Carter. Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Northern Neck gentry confronted not only contradictions in cultural ideals and behavioral patterns within their own lives, but also the chronic hostility of their poorer white neighbors, arising from a diverse array of local economic and political issues. These insecurities were further intensified by changes in the system of African American slavery and by the growing role of Scottish merchants and their Virginia agents in the marketing of Chesapeake tobacco. For a time, the upheavals surrounding the War for American Independence and the roughly contemporaneous rise of vibrant, biracial evangelical religious movements threatened to increase popular discontent to the point of overwhelming the gentry's political authority and cultural hegemony. But in the end, the existing order survived essentially intact. In part, this was because the region's leaders found ways to limit and accommodate threatening developments and patterns of change, largely through the use of traditional social and political appeals that had served them well for decades. Yet in part it was also because ordinary Northern Neckers--including many leaders in the movements of wartime and religious dissidence--consciously or unconsciously accommodated themselves to both the patterns of economic change transforming their world and to the traditional ideals of the elite, and thus were unable to articulate or accept an alternative vision for the future of the region.

Journalist Rebecca Traister's New York Times bestselling exploration of the transformative power of female anger and its ability to transcend into a political movement is "a hopeful, maddening compendium of righteous feminine anger, and the good it can do when wielded efficiently-and collectively" (Vanity Fair). Long before Pantsuit Nation, before the Women's March, and before the #MeToo movement, women's anger was not only politically catalytic-but politically problematic. The story of female fury and its cultural significance demonstrates its crucial role in women's slow rise to political power in America, as well as the ways that anger is received when it comes from women as opposed to when it comes from men. "Urgent, enlightened...realistic and compelling...Traister eloquently highlights the challenge of blaming not just forces and systems, but individuals" (The Washington Post). In Good and Mad, Traister tracks the history of female anger as political fuel-from suffragettes marching on the White House to office workers vacating their buildings after Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court. Traister explores women's anger at both men and other women; anger between ideological allies and foes; the varied ways anger is received based on who's expressing it; and the way women's collective fury has become transformative political fuel. She deconstructs society's (and the media's) condemnation of female emotion (especially rage) and the impact of their resulting repercussions. Highlighting a double standard perpetuated against women by all sexes, and its disastrous, stultifying effect, Good and Mad is "perfectly timed and inspiring" (People, Book of the Week). This "admirably rousing narrative" (The Atlantic) offers a glimpse into the galvanizing force of women's collective anger, which, when harnessed, can change history.

This biography of Beatriz Allende (1942-1977) - revolutionary doctor and daughter of Chile's socialist president, Salvador Allende - portrays what it means to live, love, and fight for change. Inspired by the Cuban Revolution, Beatriz and her generation drove political campaigns, university reform, public health programs, internationalist guerrilla insurgencies, and government strategies. Centering Beatriz's life within the global contours of the Cold War era, Tanya Harmer exposes the promises and paradoxes of the revolutionary wave that swept through Latin America in the long 1960s. Drawing on exclusive access to Beatriz's private papers, as well as firsthand interviews, Harmer connects the private and political as she reveals the human dimensions of radical upheaval. Exiled to Havana after Chile's right-wing military coup, Beatriz worked tirelessly to oppose dictatorship back home. Harmer's interviews make vivid the terrible consequences of the coup for the Chilean Left, the realities of everyday life in Havana, and the unceasing demands of solidarity work that drained Beatriz and her generation of the dreams they once had. Her story demolishes the myth that women were simply extras in the story of Latin America's Left and brings home the immense cost of a revolutionary moment's demise.

On June 23, 1900, the Southern Railroad Company's Engine #7 and its passengers were greeted by a tremendous storm en route to Atlanta, Georgia. Stalled for some time in nearby McDonough, travelers grew impatient as rain pelted the roof and wind buffeted the cars. When finally given the go-ahead, their resulting joy was short-lived: the locomotive soon reached Camp Creek--and disaster. After weeks of constant showers, the swollen creek had eroded the bridge supports. Under the train's weight, the bridge collapsed, and all but nine perished in either the fiery fall or watery depths. With the help of local newspapers and eyewitness accounts, Georgia historian and professor Jeffery C. Wells recounts this tragic tale.

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.

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 have continued to call these plantations home throughout the past two centuries. Discover why the families of an Indian chief and a chief justice feuded for over a century about the land on which Belvoir stands. Follow Gaineswood's progress as it grew from a humble log cabin into an opulent mansion. Learn how the original builder and subsequent owners of the Kirkwood Mansion are linked by a legacy of exceptional and dedicated preservation. "Historic Plantations of Alabama's Black Belt" recounts the elegant past and hopeful future of a well-loved region of the South.

With fortunes that have ebbed and flowed with the tides, Annapolis has graced the banks of the Severn River and the Chesapeake Bay since the seventeenth century. Generations have worked the docks, sailed its waters and hunted for Chesapeake Gold--oysters--even as the city became home to a proud military tradition in the United States Naval Academy. Local author Rosemary F. Williams presents a vivid image of Annapolis with tales of violent skirmishes between the dashing Captain Waddell and crews of outlaw oyster poachers, the crabbing rage of the twentieth century, feisty shipwright Benjamin Sallier and the city's Golden Age of Sailing. Williams's fluid prose and stunning vintage images chronicle the maritime history of this capital city and reveal its residents' deep connection to the ever-shifting waters.

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.

"The Mind of a Patriot" presents an intellectual life of a major figure who has traditionally been seen as an anti-intellectual "child of nature." This was the view of Patrick Henry that William Wirt presented in his "Life of Henry, " and it has pervaded every biography since. Hayes presents a very different view of Henry. Starting with neglected pieces of evidence-the inventory of Henry's library-Hayes's unique perspective allows him to position Henry's life within the intellectual currents of the day. After the opening chapter, which shows how Thomas Jefferson's opinions of Henry influenced Wirt's depiction of him, the author traces Henry's life through his relationship with the world of books. Individual chapters examine Henry's education; his legal career; his use of books to improve his speaking style; his relationship to the antislavery movement; his use of books as a legislator, a farmer, and a father; and, ultimately, the place of books in his life during his waning years. In a lengthy appendix, Hayes reconstructs Henry's library, presenting a detailed catalogue of its contents.