From fighting the British in colonial America to the corrupt wild west to the controversial old South, this month brings a wide array of history books that touch upon several tumultuous times in U.S. history. Read on to see what books will be available this April!
In Boomtown, author Joe Pappalardo shares the true story of the corrupt and violent town of Borger, Texas in 1927―and the legendary Texas Ranger tasked with taming it.
Just a year after the town of Borger was founded, the press already called it “the wickedest in the state.” The town, sprung into existence overnight to support new oilfields, was a lawless haven filled with corruption and vice as well as everyday people seeking second chances.
The raucous environment attracted some of the most unsavory characters in prohibition America, including a gang of murderous bank robbers who head into Borger to spend their money on booze, gambling, and prostitutes. In the span of weeks, the robbers killed three law enforcement officers, bringing the worst heat imaginable: iconic Texas Ranger Captain Frank Hamer, just a few years before his takedown of Bonnie and Clyde. His arrival threatens to break the hardest boomtown in America―if it doesn’t kill him first.
From Bancroft Prize-winning historian Melvin Patrick Ely, A Terrible Intimacy is a revelatory new account of slavery, uncovering a surprising web of relationships between Black and white people that ranges far beyond the familiar template of “master-slave” dynamics.
Contrary to our common assumption, fully half the enslaved people in the South lived not on sprawling plantations but on small properties. Cruelty was baked into the system, and exploiters and exploited knew each other well. Slaves, slave owners, overseers, and poor whites drank, played, slept, and even committed crimes together. Yet whippings happened often, enslaved families were split up, and white men fought for their right to own other human beings.
These webs of interaction make clear that white Americans recognized the humanity of their Black neighbors, even as they remained committed to a system that abused and sometimes terrorized them. Offering striking new insights into the true complexity of life in the old South, A Terrible Intimacy expands our understanding of this darkest of histories.
Timed for the 250th anniversary of America’s revolution and founding: Paul Revere’s heroic ride is told with fresh research into little-known aspects of the story Americans have heard since childhood but hardly understood.
On April 18, 1775, a Boston-based silversmith, engraver, and anti-British political operative named Paul Revere set out on a borrowed horse to fulfill a dangerous but crucial mission: to alert American colonists of advancing British troops, which would seek to crush their nascent revolt.
Revere was not the only rider that night, disseminating intelligence about British movements. But this ride was like no other, and its consequences in the months and years to come—as the American Revolution morphed from isolated skirmishes to a full-fledged war—became one of our founding stories.
Thrillingly written in a dramatic, unstoppable narrative, The Ride re-tells an essential American story for a new generation of readers.
A USA Today bestseller, now available in paperback.
A thrilling true saga of legendary Texas figure Judge Roy Bean and his brothers―and their violent adventures in Wild West America.
Roy Bean was an American saloon-keeper and Justice of the Peace in Texas, who called himself “The Only Law West of the Pecos”. He and his three brothers set out from Kentucky in the mid 1840s, heading into the American frontier to find their fortunes. Their lifetimes of triumphs, tragedies, laurels and scandals will play out on the battlefields of Mexico, in shady dealings in California city halls, inside eccentric saloon courtrooms of Texas, and along the blood-soaked Santa Fe Trail from Missouri to New Mexico. They will kill men, and murder will likewise stalk them.
Using new information gleaned from exhaustive research, Joe Pappalardo’s Four Against the West is an unprecedented and vivid telling of the intertwined stories of all four Bean brothers, exploring for the first time how their relentless ambitions helped create a new America.
Now available in paperback.
In the tradition of The Barbizon and The Girls of Atomic City, fashion historian and journalist Nancy MacDonell chronicles the untold story of how the Nazi invasion of France gave rise to the American fashion industry.
Today, American designers are some of the biggest names in fashion, yet before World War II, they almost always worked anonymously. The industry, then centered on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, had always looked overseas for “inspiration”—a polite phrase for what was often blatant copying—because style, as all the world knew, came from Paris.
But when the Nazis invaded France in 1940, the capital of fashion was cut off from the rest of the world. Defying the naysayers, New York-based designers, retailers, editors, and photographers met the moment, turning out clothes that were perfectly suited to the American way of life. By the end of the war, “the American Look” had been firmly established as a fresh, easy elegance that combined function with style. But none of it would have happened without the influence and ingenuity of a small group of women who have largely been lost to history.
Empresses of Seventh Avenue will tell the story of how these extraordinary women put American fashion on the world stage and created the template for modern style.
Now available in paperback.