Award-Winning Books

Uncover lost gems of Circle City history/

More than two centuries removed from its founding, Indianapolis has seen its share of landmarks and landscapes pass into memory. Some have totally vanished, such as the National Road covered bridge over the White River, the Marion County courthouse, the 1835 Indiana statehouse, and the previous headquarters for the long-standing Flanner House organization. Others still exist, but not in their original location or form, like Pogue's Run, the Central Canal through downtown, and the remnants of structures at Riverside Park./ 

Indianapolis historian Edward Fujawa explores the history of lost sites, how they appear today, and how some are still used or repurposed.

INDEPENDENT PUBLISHER BOOK AWARDS BEST REGIONAL NONFICTION OF THE SOUTH GOLD MEDAL

“When an elderly couple is charged with murder in the drowning deaths of thirty-five bed-ridden residents of St. Rita's Nursing Home, an emotional edge-of-your-seat thriller takes off like a shot! The players: a wily and profane defense lawyer, a ferocious prosecutor, vengeful families of the victims, and a ravenous media that brands the defendants ‘Monsters of Hurricane Katrina.’ My advice—block out enough time to read this wonderful book in one sitting.”
—John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

“A passionate and personal book, artfully constructed.”
—Washington Post

“A war story of jurisprudence. . . . a book you wish wouldn't end.”
—Daily Beast

A virtuoso book about midwestern identity and the future of the region. Named a Commonweal Notable Book of 2020, a finalist for a Midwest Independent Book award, and winner of the Independent Publisher Awards' 2020 Bronze Medal for Great Lakes Nonfiction.

The Midwest: Is it middle? Or is it Western? As Phil Christman writes in this idiosyncratic, critically acclaimed essay collection, these and other ambiguities might well be the region's defining characteristic. Deftly combining history, criticism, and memoir, Christman breaks his exploration of midwestern identity, past and present, into a suite of thirty-six brief, interconnected essays. Ranging across material questions of religion, race, class, climate, and Midwestern myth making, the result is a sometimes sardonic, often uproarious, and consistently thought-provoking look at a misunderstood place and the people who call it home.

As James Fallows of The Atlantic noted, it's A combination of history, memoir, reportage, and lit-crit that taught me a lot about a region I've reported on.... Check it out.

For anyone who has ever wondered why being from the Midwest is synonymous with normalcy, even when nothing could be further from the truth.

Sonya Huber, author of the award-winning Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System, offers a candid, lyrical look inside the unsung world of exurban Illinois.New Lenox, Illinois, is a small town deep in the corn grid of the Midwest, where it runs up against the grid of south Chicagoland, a placeless location marked by geographical flatness and dwindling industry. It's also where Sonya Huber grew up, and in the twenty essays collected here, she lovingly explores the ways New Lenox--and the Midwest more generally--has come to define her life. Here, you'll find portraits of Huber's parents as they tirelessly run a small business, homages to the Gen-X joys of wearing flannel, secret insights about being a Pizza Hut waitress, and odes to the ecstasy of blasting classic rock as your car hurls along I-80. Whether she's writing about All in the Family, detailing the region's influence on David Foster Wallace, or exploring the poetry embedded in a can of Miller High Life, her vision is astute and her prose convincing. Sometimes experimental and always inventive, Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook takes seriously Chicagoland's farthest reaches--gritty, sweeping, a region full of its own distinct feelings of almostness--and transforms them into a map of the heart, a ramshackle territory marked by memory, family, regret, determination, and wonderment

Winner of the Association of New York Public Historians 2023 Excellence in Local History Award

Winner of the American Legacy Book Award 2024 for United States History

Winner of the NYC Big Book Award 2024 for Regional-Nonfiction

Winner of the IAN Book of the Year Award 2024 for Outstanding Non-Fiction: History 

The Van Wyck, the Major Deegan, the Jackie Robinson, the Hutch, the Merritt, FDR Drive, or the Henry Hudson...you might drive them regularly, without really noticing that those road names are, well, names. But, who were these people?

New York's many roads, bridges, tunnels, neighborhoods and institutions bear the names of a diverse cast of characters. The Kosciuszko Bridge honors Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a Polish American Revolutionary War hero and fervent abolitionist. The Outerbridge Crossing, named after the Port Authority's first chairman, Eugenius Outerbridge, is called a crossing because Outerbridge Bridge sounded absurd. Shirley Chisholm State Park celebrates the first Black woman elected to Congress, the larger-than-life Shirley Chisholm. Clifford Holland originally designed his tunnel under the Hudson River to accommodate horse carts. These place names embody the rich history of the city that never sleeps, yet few know their true stories. Author Rebecca Bratspies uncovers the vibrant personalities behind the names that have become New York's urban shorthand for traffic jams, culture and recreation.

One of NPR's Best Books of 2020, and winner of the 2020 Independent Publisher Awards' gold medal for LGBTQ+ nonfiction, Raechel Anne Jolie's blazing memoir is now available in paperback.

Raechel Anne Jolie's early life in a working-class Cleveland exurb was full of race cars, Budweiser-drinking men, and the women who loved them. When she was four, though, her life changed forever when her father was hit by a drunk driver and suffered a debilitating brain injury.

Rust Belt Femme is the chronicle of her survival. Fearlessly honest, wry, and tender, Jolie digs into both the pain of past traumas and the joy of teenaged discovery to craft a love letter to the brassy, big-haired women who raised her and the 90s alternative, riot grrrl culture that shaped her into who she is today: a queer femme with PTSD and a deep love of the Midwest.

Personal and political, lyrical and fierce, Rust Belt Femme speaks to anyone who was once a misfit kid trying to find their place in the world.

Anxiety may be the defining feeling of our current era, and though it affects many people on a deeply personal level, the last few years have also witnessed the rise of more communal feelings of dread and unknowing, problems that sometimes seem too big to face. Will the United States remain a democracy? Can we still have meaningful lives amid the rubble of late capitalism and the inevitable creep of climate change? How do we even start to grapple with a problem so large it seems to pervade almost every corner of our lives?

In Reading Arendt in the Waiting Room, Jonathan Foiles, a licensed psychotherapist and lecturer at the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, explains how philosophy can help us respond to these deep questions and communal worries about modern life. Read how Søren Kierkegaard can speak to feelings of helplessness in the face of police violence, how Hannah Arendt can help us rethink the seemingly unavoidable problem of a warming planet, and how social advocates like Jane Addams and Dorothy Day can offer hope and resolve in a world that sometimes seems like it’s already ended.

Thoughtful, discerning, personal, and accessible, Reading Arendt in the Waiting Room will serve as a concise companion for anyone looking to address our cultural unease and find new ways to face it together. 

What does the future hold for the Midwest?

A vast stretch of fertile farmland bordering one of the largest concentrations of fresh water in the world, the Midwestern US seems ideally situated for the coming challenges of climate change. But it also sits at the epicenter of a massive economic collapse that many of its citizens are still struggling to overcome. The question of what the Midwest is (and what it will become) is nothing new. As Phil Christman writes in this idiosyncratic new book, ambiguity might be the region's defining characteristic. Taking a cue from Jefferson’s grid, the famous rectangular survey of the Old Northwest Territory that turned everything from Ohio to Wisconsin into square-mile lots, Christman breaks his exploration of Midwestern identity, past and present, into 36 brief, interconnected essays. The result is a sometimes sardonic, often uproarious, and consistently thought-provoking look at a misunderstood place and the people who call it home.

When Rubén Castilla Herrera died suddenly in 2019, he left an acute void in Ohio's grassroots organizing community. Notably at the forefront of many regional social justice campaigns, his life and work still reverberate through the lives of those he fought so hard for: immigrants, refugees, farmworkers, the displaced, and many, many others who refuse to simply comply with injustice. Synthesizing oral histories, community voices, and ideas from queer Latinidad and migrant worker activism, Trust the Circle details Herrera's intimate and vulnerable way of seeing the world and his role in it as an agent of change. Here, you'll learn about: - His childhood in Texas and Oregon, where he and his siblings were forced into agricultural labor after the early death of their mother, and where Herrera first encountered the Chicano activism of César Chávez and Dr. José Ángel Gutiérrez. - His move to Columbus, Ohio, and the development of his unique circle-based leadership approach. - His coming-out as a queer Latinx man in middle age. - His tireless work toward the end of his life to help provide sanctuary for undocumented migrants during the Trump administration.  Marked by the voices and remembrances of those who knew Herrera best, Trust the Circle is a biography about one grassroots organizer and the profound changes he was able to accomplish. But it's also about the ways that an intersectional and inclusive approach to organizing can be applied anywhere there is injustice.

Chesapeake oysters are part of the legacy of the area, history on the half-shell. Read of their beginning (foot-long bivalves!) through cultivation today.

The eastern oyster, the humble bivalve and delicous treat, are the living bones of the Chesapeake, as well as the ecological and historical lifeblood of the region. When colonists first sailed these impossibly abundant shores, they described massive shoals of foot-long oysters but the bottomless appetite of the Gilded Age and great fleets of skipjacks took their toll. Disease, environmental pressures and overconsumption decimated the population by the end of the twentieth century. While Virginia turned to bottom-leasing, passionate debate continues in Maryland among scientists and oystermen whether aquaculture or wild harvesting is the better way forward. Today, boutique oyster farming in the Bay is sustainably meeting the culinary demand of a new generation of connoisseurs. With careful research and interviews with experts, author Kate Livie presents this dynamic story and a glimpse of what the future may hold.

Anxiety may be the defining feeling of our current era, and though it affects many people on a deeply personal level, the last few years have also witnessed the rise of more communal feelings of dread and unknowing, problems that sometimes seem too big to face. Will the United States remain a democracy? Can we still have meaningful lives amid the rubble of late capitalism and the inevitable creep of climate change? How do we even start to grapple with a problem so large it seems to pervade almost every corner of our lives?

In Reading Arendt in the Waiting Room, Jonathan Foiles, a licensed psychotherapist and lecturer at the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, explains how philosophy can help us respond to these deep questions and communal worries about modern life. Read how Søren Kierkegaard can speak to feelings of helplessness in the face of police violence, how Hannah Arendt can help us rethink the seemingly unavoidable problem of a warming planet, and how social advocates like Jane Addams and Dorothy Day can offer hope and resolve in a world that sometimes seems like it’s already ended.

Thoughtful, discerning, personal, and accessible, Reading Arendt in the Waiting Room will serve as a concise companion for anyone looking to address our cultural unease and find new ways to face it together.

"Wherever two or three Norwegians gathered together, they constructed a jump and held competitions.'? -Harold "Cork'? Anson

Ski jumping, once Washington's most popular winter sport, was introduced by Norwegian immigrants in the early twentieth century. It began at Spokane's Browne's Mountain and Seattle's Queen Anne Hill, then moved to midsummer tournaments on Mount Rainier in 1917 and expanded statewide as new ski clubs formed. Washington tournaments attracted the world's best jumpers--Birger and Sigurd Ruud, Alf Engen, Sigurd Ulland and Reidar Andersen, among others. In 1941, Torger Tokle set two national distance records here in just three weeks. Regional ski areas hosted national and international championships as well as Olympic tryouts, entertaining spectators until Leavenworth's last tournament in 1978.

Lawyer, historian and award-winning author John W. Lundin recreates the excitement of this nearly forgotten ski jumping heritage.

A wine country odyssey.

In 1976, the picturesque, agrarian Napa Valley was all but unknown to those who didn’t live there. That changed dramatically when Steven Spurrier and Patricia Gallagher decided to host a blind tasting of American and French wines in Paris. When wines from California defeated those of France, the world was shocked, an industry reawakened, and Napa Valley exploded in a frenzy of growth and development. Families who had farmed for generations battled to hang onto their land, and many paid a steep price as the area transformed into one of the world’s premier wine-growing regions.

Join author Mark Gudgel as he explores the trials and tribulations of Napa’s meteoric rise to prominence.

Everyone loves an underdog who succeeds against the odds. CCNY Made. Profiles in Grit is the story of City College of New York alumni who beat the odds to reach the pinnacle of their professions and in the process transformed our world. Here are just a few:lAndrew Grove, hearing impaired and a survivor of Nazi occupation and Communist rule became the visionary CEO of Intel Corporation, the manufacturer of the semiconductor chip found in most personal computers today.lYip Harburg, the son of immigrants, wrote the lyrics to countless music standards, including “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” one of the most celebrated songs of all times.

lJonas Salk, facing antisemitism and the rebuke of the scientific community, developed the Salk Vaccine that irradicated polio from the face of the earth.

lFelix Frankfurter, who came to America at 12 speaking no English, would be appointed a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, and help write the unanimous opinion in Brown v. the Board of Education declaring school segregation in the United States illegal. In “CCNY Made. Profiles In Grit,” the stories of CCNY alumni are recounted who exemplify the promise of Townsend Harris, founder of CCNY and The Ephebic Oath affirmed by graduating students every year.

“We will strive unceasingly to quicken the public’s better, of civic duty; and thus, in all these ways we will strive to transmit this city not only not less, but greater, better and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us.”

Winner of the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Authors Award for Nonfiction

New Jersey's land records and deeds are unlikely sources for a thrilling tale but reveal little-known, fascinating history. A detailed story of the founding of the Garden State 350 years ago is preserved in these papers. The state's boundaries were drawn in such documents centuries ago, even if the authors never stepped foot in North America. The archives hide heroes, like the freed African Americans who fought for their right to own their piece of the state. And of course, there are the bizarre and mysterious tales, like the silk baron's castle and the assault against a sixteen-year-old maiden during the throes of the American Revolution. Join land title expert Joseph Grabas as he combs through these all-but-forgotten stories of the pursuit of happiness and property in early New Jersey.

Prudery, Polygamy and Politics

Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon was no hands-on-the-plow pioneer. She was no stereotypical polygamous wife. Nor was she a prim lady who blushed at the word "legs." Victorian Mormons were proud to lead the way in empowering women. "Verily the world progresseth," exclaimed the Deseret Evening News on March 17, 1869, celebrating a Congressional bill to give Utah women the vote. But the federal intention to have female suffrage in Utah destroy polygamy failed. The 1882 Edmunds Act made "cohabitation" a felony. To protect her polygamous husband, she fled to England with their infant daughter. Upon her return, she reestablished her medical practice and opened Utah's first training school for nurses. Nominated by local Democrats, Mattie ran against her husband for state senate in 1896 - beating him by four thousand votes. Author Joan Jacobson chronicles an extraordinary life remarkably relevant for today.