Architecture

New York City is blessed with an incredible array of public sculptures.

One overlooked aspect of this collection is its monuments of Black Americans, each with its own remarkable story. The first appearance of a Black person in a city monument came in the Civil War Soldiers’ Monument in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery in 1876, but this was a nameless symbolic figure. It wasn’t until 1945 that Booker T. Washington became the first identifiable Black American honored in a New York City monument. In 2007, the city dedicated its first monument to a Black woman, Harriet Tubman. Behind every first is a story of triumph over adversity and exclusion. Local author David Felsen reveals the stories behind thirty inspiring monuments that have endured, as well as how they found their place in the city’s history.

Germans in Milwaukee: A Neighborhood History chronicles the stories behind the German footprints in the city.

Like no other large American city, Germans dominated Milwaukee. Their presence inhabits the city's neighborhoods from its buildings and place names to its parklands and statuary. Their influence also lives in the memories shared by local residents. A small Milwaukee neighborhood south of Miller Valley was christened after a farmer's pigs, and a busboy turned beer baron built the famous Pabst Brewery in West Town. A ghost is said to haunt the old Blatz Brewing compound. And the remains of the early tanning industry can still be seen in Walker's Point.

Compiling over 1,200 interviews through their organization, Urban Anthropology Inc., authors Jill Lackey and Richard Petrie share these ground-level perspectives of the lasting German influence on the Cream City.

Richmond is a classic Southern city, most notable as the Confederate capitol. However, the irony of Richmond is that much of its beautiful architecture was built by Black laborers.

The city's vast and varied collection of architecture provides an archive of African American history, both of enslaved and free peoples. Author Selden Richardson explains how iconic symbols of old Richmond and the generations of Black laborers who helped assemble it are embodied in both the preserved and the forgotten architecture of the city. After you finish this book, it will be as if the buildings in Richmond tell their own stories to you.

The Outer Banks of North Carolina attract those with a conviction to dream and do. Explorers, pirates, lifesavers and the world's first pilots decorate the halls of local history.

Some of the Outer Banks' greatest accomplishments are due to daring women who pushed the odds. Eleanor Dare created a new life amidst a doomed colonial expedition, Chrissy Bowser found her freedom as the Civil War rocked Roanoke Island, and Irene Tate watched the Wright brothers assemble their glider in her front yard then went on to become a record-setting pilot herself. The women in this book fought for their homes. They stepped outside the traditional roles of their day and age, seeking to preserve its history and heritage. They saved sand dunes and moved lighthouses.

Local author Hannah West tells the stories of these remarkable women.