Kategoria BISAC: History >> United States - State & Local - Midwest(IA,IL,IN,KS,MI,MN,MO,ND,NE,OH,SD,WI

On the afternoon of December 30, 1903, during a sold-out matinee performance, a fire broke out in Chicago s Iroquois Theatre. In the short span of twenty minutes, more than six hundred people were asphyxiated, burned, or trampled to death in a panicked mob s failed attempt to escape. In Chicago Death Trap: The Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903, Nat Brandt provides a detailed chronicle of this horrific event to assess not only the titanic tragedy of the fire itself but also the municipal corruption and greed that kindled the flames beforehand and the political cover-ups hidden in the...

"To the victors belong the spoils" is a time-honored cliche. When in 1865 northern armies defeated the greatest challenge ever posed to the Union, issues of spoils and peace terms dominated public debate. But precisely what did the victorious North want from the Reconstruction process? Historians generally have shown far less interest in northern goals than in what terms southerners were willing to accept. Robert Sawrey now seeks to redress the balance by examining the post-Civil War attitudes of a representative northern state, Ohio.

Sawrey's probing study explores precisely what...

When young James Coomer was offered a job as deckhand on the tugboat Pat Murphy at a dollar an hour, he took his first smell of diesel fuel and knew he was hooked. Life on the Ohio puts the reader in the pilot's seat as Coomer wrestles with runaway barges, navigates through ice and fog, pacifies angry crew members, and contends with the loneliness of working a thirty-day stretch. A modern counterpart to Twain's account of life as a steamboat pilot, Life on the Ohio depicts the working river as it is today with its immense towboats, gigantic locks and dams, and millions of tons of...

Up and down the Great Lakes, wherever captains and seamen met, one of the chief topics of conversation is still the Great Storm-the worst disaster in Great Lakes history. By men of the Lakes, November 9, 1913 will always be remembered as Black Sunday, for it brought death to hundreds of their companions and destruction to scores of ships of the Lakes fleet. Each man who survived the Storm has a fascinating story to tell.

Freshwater Fury is the first comprehensive history of the Great Storm. Author Frank Barcus, who has met and talked with many survivors during his trips on Lakes...

John Bartlow Martin, a freelance writer who had spent long weeks in northern Wisconsin and Michigan, was struck with the idea of a book on Michigan's Upper Peninsula when he was there on his wedding trip. Returning each summer to the area, Martin discovered the region's diverse history, full of colorful and interesting personalities and events. The territory has been wilderness, a haunt of the Chippewas and the Hurons, copper country, iron country, lumber country, and lastly, a vacation land.

Filled with stories of adventure and daring, Call It North Country recounts the lives of...

The Making of Michigan is a wide-ranging collection of primary accounts of life in Michigan during the pioneer period, the era from the 1820s to the outbreak of the Civil War. In this time of explosive growth, the state's population increased from 8,000 to 750,000. These emigrants brought the state into the union in 1837 and began to create a set of institutions and a way of life.

Justin Kestenbaum draws on the rich documentary record left by those who sojourned in the state during this time and recorded their impressions. Not only pioneers but land speculators, missionaries, and...

Joe Grimm of the Detroit Free Press has combined a fascinating collection of old family letters, diaries, journals, photos, and other memorabilia in this rare glimpse at Michigan's past. Based on a series of articles that appeared in the "Chronicles" column of the Detroit Free Press Sunday magazine from 1985 to 1987, Michigan Voices introduces the reader to a more personal side of the state's history.
Excerpts from historical documents include Cadillac's proposal of 1700 to establish Detroit and Roger Andrews' crusade for an independent Upper Peninsula in 1916. Among the chronicles...

Michigan's foremost lumbertowns, flourishing urban industrial centers in the late 19th century, faced economic calamity with the depletion of timber supplies by the end of the century. Turning to their own resources and reflecting individual cultural identities, Saginaw, Bay City, and Muskegon developed dissimilar strategies to sustain their urban industrial status. This study is a comprehensive history of these lumbertowns from their inception as frontier settlements to their emergence as reshaped industrial centers.

Primarily an examination of the role of the entrepreneur in urban...

Ojibwa Narratives presents a fresh view of an early period of Ojibwa thought and ways of life in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and the south shore of Lake Superior. This fascinating collection of fifty-two narratives features, for the first time, the tales of three nineteenth-century Ojibwa storytellers-Charles and Charlotte Kawbawgam and Jaques LePique-collected by Homer H. Kidder.

By the late nineteenth century, typical Ojibwa life had been disrupted by the influx of white developers. But these tales reflect a nostalgic view of an earlier period when the heart of Ojibwa semi-nomadic...

On January 17, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment took effect in the United States, prohibiting the manufacture, sale, use, or importation of alcoholic beverages except for scientific and medicinal purposes. Church and business leaders, temperance advocates, and state and
national officials predicted that a tranquil new era was about to begin-an era when prisons would be empty, police forces could be drastically cut, and workers would be more productive, spending time with their families rather than in saloons.

As Rumrunning and the Roaring Twenties illustrates, peace and tranquillity and...

"Brewed in Detroit" describes the history of the brewing industry in the Detroit metropolitan area (including Ann Arbor, Mt. Clemens, Pontiac, Windsor, Wyandotte, and Ypsilanti) from its beginning in the 1830s to the present revival by microbrewers and brewpubs.

A historian and trained veteran of the brewing industry, Peter H. Blum divides Detroit brewing history into seven distinct phases: the early Anglo-Saxon ale brewers, the German brewers who arrived after 1848, the rise of brewing dynasties in the 1880s, Prohibition, the return of beer in the era after repeal in 1933, the war...

Despite its inland location, Detroit's origins as a French outpost make it older than many other cities of the eastern United States. Frontier Metropolis illustrates and describes all known images of Detroit in the pre-photographic era to provide a nearly complete visual chronology made by people who knew the city.

Brian Leigh Dunnigan has arranged these maps, plans, and views to show the evolution of Detroit and its community life over its first 137 years. Chapter introductions review issues faced by Detroit residents during the years covered, while text accompanying the images places...