Noah Webster, Charles Goodyear, P.T. Barnum and Katharine Hepburn all have Connecticut in common. Like so many other residents, they had an inventive spirit and drive that changed the course of history for the rest of the state. Some of the state's natives, like Eli Whitney and Henry C. Lee, pioneered new methods. Prudence Crandall and Helen Keller championed the rights of the underprivileged. Some, like Frederick Law Olmsted and Sol LeWitt, changed...

Eloquent, humble, and shrewd, Abraham Lincoln was one of America's greatest presidents, and The Essential Lincoln brings together his most defining speeches, public and private correspondence, and personal notations in one slim, handsome volume. Lincoln historian Orville Vernon Burton has culled the thousands of pages of the complete works of Lincoln for the most compelling and revealing pieces. Many are presented unabridged, including Lincoln's speech...

Muncie is the classic small American city. But for much of the past two centuries, the city fell victim to murder, corruption and the bizarre. Mayor Rollin Bunch went to prison for mail fraud, while his police commissioner faced a murder rap. Viola "Babe" Swartz ran a brothel out of a truck stop that was raided by police at least a dozen times but ran for sheriff in the 1974 primary election. June Holland, of the locally famous Holland triplets, killed...

The nineteenth-century American Colonization Society (ACS) project of persuading all American free blacks to emigrate to the ACS colony of Liberia could never be accomplished. Few free blacks volunteered, and greater numbers would have overwhelmed the meager resources of the ACS. Given that reality, who supported African colonization and why? No state was more involved with the project than Virginia, where white Virginians provided much of the political...

Roanoke. Manteo. Wanchese. Chicamacomico. These place names along today's Outer Banks are a testament to the Indigenous communities that thrived for generations along the Carolina coast. Though most sources for understanding these communities were written by European settlers who began to arrive in the late sixteenth century, those sources nevertheless offer a fascinating record of the region's Algonquian-speaking people. Here, drawing on decades...

"A Fast Company Best Design Book of the Year" Eva Hagberg teaches in the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College and at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. Her books include How to Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship and Nature Framed: At Home in the Landscape. She lives in Brooklyn. A uniquely personal biographical account of Louchheim's life and work that takes readers inside the...

Pleasure Island opened on June 22, 1959, in Wakefield, Massachusetts. Designed by Marco Engineering of Los Angeles, it was the second of three innovative theme parks built across America to mimic Disneyland. Pleasure Island was conceived by William Hawkes, president of Child Life magazine, and with support from Boston's Cabot, Cabot & Forbes and local and national investors, the vision of the park was brought to life. Just by passing through a turnstile,...

Organized fire protection in Frederick County, Maryland, existed before the adoption of the Constitution. Follow the colorful history of the fire companies from the first fire engine in 1764 to the fire company militia units that were, summoned to Harper's Ferry and fire halls used during the Civil War. Learn how the fire companies in Frederick County had statewide influence by organizing the Maryland State Firemen's Association in 1893. Read of the...

A two-part book in which French investigative journalist Maurice Rajsfus, who survived the 1942 "Black Thursday" roundup at Vel d'Hiv of 13,000 Jews, recollects events that day and uses meticulous research of police archives to make a damning inquiry of Vichy/police collaboration, examining the implementation of the Yellow Star, France's culpability in the Holocaust, and the influence of right-wing media.

Do you listen to music with an MP3 player or read books on a tablet? Do you play multiplayer video games with people on the other side of the world? Do you have a robot cleaning your kitchen? Maybe not yet, but someday!In Technology: Cool Women Who Code, kids in grades four through six learn about the thrilling effort that goes into researching, inventing, programming, and producing the technology we use today, from iPods to mechanical limbs. Young...