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What if racialized mass incarceration is not a perversion of our criminal justice system's liberal ideals, but rather a natural conclusion? Adam Malka raises this disturbing possibility through a gripping look at the origins of modern policing in the influential hub of Baltimore during and after slavery's final decades. He argues that America's new professional police forces and prisons were developed to expand, not curb, the reach of white vigilantes, and are best understood as a uniformed wing...

In the same absorbing style that characterized his bestseller Lost Hollywood--here complemented by more than twenty archival photos--David Wallace presents a richly detailed, reader-friendly chronicle of the Prohibition-era personalities and events that made New York City the cultural and financial capital of the world. Sex, sin, song, work, sports, play--all these aspects of New York and more are told through a rich array of anecdotes and "inside" profiles of the individuals that personified th...

Land-use policy is at the center of suburban political economies because everything has to happen somewhere but nothing happens by itself. In Suburb, Royce Hanson explores how well a century of strategic land-use decisions served the public interest in Montgomery County, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Transformed from a rural hinterland into the home a million people and a half-million jobs, Montgomery County built a national reputation for innovation in land use policy—including inclusi...

As the University of Maryland prepares to christen the state of the art Comcast Center, what better time to look back at the Terrapins path from college basketball obscurity to NCAA champions? Maryland Basketball: Tales from Cole Field House is a story 47 years in the making. Native Marylander and former Terp beat writer Paul McMullen recounts the history of the University of Maryland's men's basketball program during the Cole years, from 1955-2002. It is a story of tragedy and triumph, and tou...

Robert A. Van Wyck, mayor of the greater city of New York, broke ground for the first subway line by City Hall on March 24, 1900. It took four years, six months, and twenty-three days to build the line from City Hall to West 145th Street in Harlem. Things rarely went that quickly ever again. The Routes Not Taken explores the often dramatic stories behind the unbuilt or unfinished subway lines, shedding light on a significant part of New York City's history that has been almost completely ignored...

Subways and yellow taxis may be the icons of New York transportation, but it is the bicycle that has the longest claim to New York's streets: two hundred years and counting. Never has it taken to the streets without controversy: 1819 was the year of the city's first bicycle and also its first bicycle ban. Debates around the bicycle's place in city life have been so persistent not just because of its many uses-recreation, sport, transportation, business-but because of changing conceptions of who...

See New Jersey history as you read about it! Envisioning New Jersey brings together 650 spectacular images that illuminate the course of the state's history, from prehistoric times to the present. Readers may think they know New Jersey's history - the state's increasing diversity, industrialization, and suburbanization - but the visual record presented here dramatically deepens and enriches that knowledge. Maxine N. Lurie and Richard F. Veit, two leading authorities on New Jersey history, prese...

The Gettysburg Campaign and its culminating battle have generatedmore than their share of analysis and published works. In My Gettysburg, Civil War scholar and twenty-six-year Gettysburg resident Mark Snell goes beyond the campaign itself to explore the "culture" of the battlefield. In this fascinating collection, Snell provides an intriguing interpretation of some neglected military aspects of the battle, such as a revisionist study of Judson Kilpatrick's decision to launch ""Farnsworth's Char...

In 1973, Western music was banned in the People’s Republic of China. But in a remarkable breakthrough cultural exchange, the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted a tour of closed-off China, becoming the first American orchestra to visit the communist nation. Jennifer Lin’s Beethoven in Beijing provides a fabulous photo-rich oral history of this boundary-breaking series of concerts the orchestra performed under famed conductor Eugene Ormandy. Lin draws from interviews, personal diaries, and news acc...

This book recreates the daily lives of laboring men and women in America's premier urban center during the second half of the eighteenth century. Billy G. Smith demonstrates how the "lower sort" (as they were called by their contemporaries) struggled to carve out meaningful lives during an era of vast change stretching from the Seven Years' War, through the turbulent events surrounding the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution, into the first decade of the new nation.

From city streets to City Hall and to Midtown corporate offices, Saving Stuyvesant Town is the incredible true story of how one middle class community defeated the largest residential real estate deal in American history. Lifetime Stuy Town resident and former City Councilman Dan Garodnick recounts how his neighbors stood up to mammoth real estate interests and successfully fought to save their homes, delivering New York City's biggest-ever affordable housing preservation win.  In 2006, Garodni...

Even among the Mob, the Westies were feared. Out of a partnership between two sadistic thugs - James Coonan and Mickey Featherstone - the gang dominated the decaying slice of New York City's West Side known as Hell's Kitchen in the 1970s and '80s. Excelling in extortion, numbers running, loansharking and drug-peddling, they became the most notorious gang in the history of organized crime. The then prosecutor Rudolf Giuliani called them 'the most savage organisation in the long history of New Yor...