2025 Summer

Alcatraz is possibly the most famous prison that has ever existed. Here is a fascinating history of this island in San Francisco Bay, with interviews and biographies of some of the notorious people who called it home.

Abadinsky provides a detailed, comprehensive analysis of the origins, history, theoretical explanations, and structure of domestic and international organized crime, including drug trafficking, gambling, and loan sharking. The author also explains the methods employed by law enforcement agencies to combat organized crime, and the policy decisions reached by various investigating committees and commissions, including the President’s Commission on Organized Crime.

The Untouchables is the gripping true story of the team of men who broke the back of the vicious Chicago crime mob and its stranglehold on the nation, told by the man who orchestrated the effort.

When her husband was murdered on the orders of Chicago mobster Frank Nitti, Georgette Winkeler—wife of one of Al Capone’s “American Boys”—set out to expose the Chicago Syndicate. After an attempt to publish her story was squelched by the mob, she offered it to the FBI in the mistaken belief that they had the authority to strike at the racketeers who had killed her husband Gus. Discovered 60 years later in FBI files, the manuscript describes the couple’s life on the run, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (Gus was one of the shooters), and other headline crimes of that period.

According to the Eliot Ness myth, which has been widely disseminated through books, television shows, and movies, Ness and the Untouchables defeated Al Capone by marshaling superior firepower. In Scarface Al and the Crime Crusaders, Dennis Hoffman presents a fresh new perspective on the downfall of Al Capone. To debunk the Eliot Ness myth, he shows how a handful of private citizens brought Capone to justice by outsmarting him rather than by outgunning him.

Presents biographical sketches of 329 individuals in American Indian history, ranging from the arrival of European colonists in North America to the late twentieth century; arranged alphabetically, with a timeline, and tribal affiliation and general indexes.

A–Z arrangement of biographies; lengthy articles with graphics; index by tribe; chronology of Indians.

An indispensable introduction to the rich variety of Native leadership in the modern era, The New Warriors profiles Native men and women who have played a significant role in the affairs of their communities and of the nation over the course of the twentieth century.

Like Montezuma (A Boy Named Beckoning), Zitkala-Ša is an important figure in Native American history about whom nothing has been written for children. This is a picture book biography of Zitkala-Ša, born Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, a Native American woman at the turn of the twentieth century.

In Recasting the Vote, Cathleen D. Cahill tells the powerful stories of a multiracial group of activists who propelled the national suffrage movement toward a more inclusive vision of equal rights. Cahill reveals a new cast of heroines largely ignored in earlier suffrage histories: Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša), Laura Cornelius Kellogg, Carrie Williams Clifford, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, and Adelina “Nina” Luna Otero-Warren.

In this edited volume, Theda Perdue, a nationally known expert on Indian history and southern women’s history, offers a rich collection of biographical essays on Native American women. From Pocahontas, a Powhatan woman of the seventeenth century, to Ada Deer, the Menominee woman who headed the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1990s, the essays span four centuries.

Zane Grey’s classic Western adventure, considered by many to have been foundational in the establishment of the Western genre. Riders of the Purple Sage follows the lives of Jane Withersteen, Bern Venters, and Jim Lassiter. Withersteen is beautiful and wealthy, and Elder Tull desires to marry her for her wealth. Featuring gunfights, cattle rustling, and more, Riders of the Purple Sage is a Western of enormous popularity.

Now, in West of Everything, Tompkins shows how popular novels and films of the American West have shaped the emotional lives of people in our time. Into this world full of violence and manly courage, the world of John Wayne and Louis L’Amour, Tompkins takes her readers, letting them feel what the hero feels, endure what he endures.

A study of Grey’s works and the use of the images that created a narrative portrait of his mythical American West.

Zane Grey was the father of the Western. To learn more about nature, the uncompromising force that shaped the characters he devised, he became an explorer, a hunter, and a champion fisherman. [Gruber] had access to the incomplete manuscript of Grey’s own autobiography, his private diaries and letters, and the family’s memories and records.

Popular western writer Zane Grey was a literary celebrity during his lifetime and the center of a huge enterprise based on his writing, which included books, magazine serials, film and stage versions of his stories, even comic strips. His wife, Dolly, closely guided Grey’s career almost from its beginning, editing and sometimes revising his work, negotiating with publishers and movie studios, and skillfully managing the considerable fortune derived from these activities.

Zane Grey was a disappointed aspirant to major league baseball and an unhappy dentist when he belatedly decided to take up writing at the age of thirty. He went on to become the most successful American author of the 1920s, a significant figure in the early development of the film industry, and a central player in the early popularity of the Western. Thomas H. Pauly’s work is the first full-length biography of Grey to appear in over thirty years.

The jazz decade saw the emergence of many of the great figures who defined the music for the world: Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Earl Hines, Bix Beiderbecke, Fats Waller, Jack Teagarden, Fletcher Henderson—these giants set the standards for blues singing, big band arrangements, and solo improvisation that are the foundations for jazz.

A biographical narrative on 500 notable black American women, this book offers information on their various fields of activity and includes statements from the subjects themselves.

The life of the Negro singer who flourished in the twenties and was known as “Queen” of the Blues.

As one of the first African American vocalists to be recorded, Bessie Smith is a prominent figure in American popular culture and African American history. Michelle R. Scott uses Smith’s life as a lens to investigate broad issues in history, including industrialization, Southern rural to urban migration, black community development in the post-emancipation era, and black working-class gender conventions.

In The Blues, Wald surveys a genre at the heart of American culture. It is not an easy thing to pin down. As Howlin” Wolf once described it, When you ain”t got no money and can”t pay your house rent and can”t buy you no food, you've damn sure got the blues. It has been defined by lyrical structure, or as a progression of chords, or as a set of practices reflecting West African tonal and rhythmic approaches, using a five-note blues scale. Wald sees blues less as a style than as a broad musical tradition within a constantly evolving pop culture. He traces its roots in work and praise songs, and shows how it was transformed by such professional performers as W. C. Handy, who first popularized the blues a century ago.

The eleven essays in this book examine nearly a century of struggle over cinematic representations of sex, crime, violence, religion, race, and ethnicity, revealing that the effort to regulate the screen has reflected deep social and cultural schisms.

Mae West invited and promptly captured the imagination of generations. Even today, years after her death, the actress and author is still regarded as the pop archetype of sexual wantonness and ribald humor. But who was this saucy starlet, a woman who was controversial enough to be jailed, pursued by film censors and banned from the airwaves for the revolutionary content of her work, and yet would ascend to the status of film legend?