Thanks to the classic Dolly Parton film The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and ZZ Top’s ode “La Grange,” many people think they know the story of the infamous Chicken Ranch. The reality is more complex, lying somewhere between heartbreaking and absurd. For more than a century, dirt farmers and big-cigar politicians alike rubbed shoulders at the Chicken Ranch, operated openly under the sheriff’s watchful eye. Madam Edna Milton and her girls ran a tight, discreet ship that the God-fearing people of La Grange tolerated if not outright embraced. That is, until a secret conspiracy enlisted an opportunistic reporter to bring it all crashing down on primetime television. Drawn from exclusive interviews and expanded with newly uncovered information, Jayme Lynn Blaschke’s revelatory exposition of the Ranch illuminates the truth and lies surrounding this iconic brothel.

Author Kathy Benjamin accompanies the pioneering women of the Lone Star State's funeral business.

The intimate task of caring for the dead had long fallen under women's sphere of responsibilities. But after the Civil War, the sudden popularity of embalming offered new financial opportunities to men who set up as undertakers, pushing women out of their traditional role. In Texas, from the 1880s to the 1930s, women slowly regained their place by the bier. Many worked while pregnant or raising children. Most shouldered the additional weight of personal tragedies and persistent sexism. All brought comfort to the bereaved in the isolation of the Texas frontier, kept its cities free of deadly disease and revolutionized an industry that was just coming into its own.

During World War II, an unprecedented number of women
took jobs at aircraft plants, shipyards, munitions factories, and other concerns across the nation to produce material essential to winning the war. Affectionately and collectively called "Rosie the Riveter" after a popular 1943 song, thousands of these women came to the U.S. Army-financed Douglas Aircraft Plant in Long Beach, the largest wartime plane manufacturer, to help produce an astonishing number of the aircraft used in the war. They riveted,
welded, assembled, and installed, doing man-sized jobs, making attack bombers, other war birds, and cargo transports. They trained at Long Beach City Schools and worked 8- and 10-hour shifts in a windowless, bomb-proof plant. Their children attended Long Beach Day Nursery, and their households ran on rations and victory gardens. When the men came home after the war ended, most of these resilient women lost their jobs.

Experience the history of Rhode Island and learn about the Ocean State's most fascinating and wild women.

Read of Mercy Brown, a nineteen-year-old consumption victim who was thought to be a vampire and whose body was exhumed and discovered with blood in the heart. There was Goody Seager, accused of infesting her neighbor's cheese with maggots by using witchcraft, and Tall ""Dutch"" Kattern of Block Island, an opium-eating fortune teller whose curse, legend says, set a ship aflame after its crew cast her ashore. Hear of the revolutionaries, like Julia Ward Howe, who invented Mother's Day and wrote the words to ""The Battle Hymn of the Republic,"" and religious reformer Anne Hutchinson, said to be the inspiration for Hawthorne's heroine in The Scarlet Letter, in these thrilling tales from author M.E. Reilly-McGreen.

Marauders like Jesse James and the Younger gang earned Missouri the title of "Outlaw State," but the male desperadoes had nothing on their female counterparts. Belle "Queen of the Bandits" Starr and Cora Hubbard kept Missouri's sensationalist newspapers and dime novelists in business with exploits ranging from horse thefts to bank heists. Missouri native Ma Barker and her murderous sons rose to infamy during the gangster era of the 1930s while Bonnie Parker crisscrossed the state with Clyde Barrow. From savvy burlesque dancers to deadly gold diggers, historian Larry Wood chronicles the titillating stories of ten of the Show-Me State's shadiest ladies.