Fascinating True Tales from Old California

Fascinating True Tales from Old California
Author: Colleen Adair Fliedner
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2023-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1493063243

For over four centuries, California has been an ever-changing landscape of innovation and revolution, triumph and tragedy. In Fascinating True Tales from Old California, author Colleen Adair Fliedner mines the history of theGolden State to collect more than fifty tales of famous Californians and their escapades from 1542 through 1940. For many, like James Lick, Leland Stanford, and John Downey, California was a place to strike it rich. Others sought freedom and a new beginning, including Chinese immigrants and African Americans, like philanthropist and freed slave, Biddy Mason. And still some characters just wanted to live their lives outside of society’s rules, like swindler James Reavis or the cross-dressing stagecoach driver, Charley Parkhurst. Readers will be entertained and enlightened as they take a trip through California’s colorful past.

Love Stories of Old California

Love Stories of Old California
Author: Mrs. Fremont Older
Publisher:
Total Pages: 366
Release: 1940
Genre: California
ISBN:

Typescript of a book published by Coward-McCann (New York, 1940).

Desert Oracle

Desert Oracle
Author: Ken Layne
Publisher: MCD
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2020-12-08
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0374722382

The cult-y pocket-size field guide to the strange and intriguing secrets of the Mojave—its myths and legends, outcasts and oddballs, flora, fauna, and UFOs—becomes the definitive, oracular book of the desert For the past five years, Desert Oracle has existed as a quasi-mythical, quarterly periodical available to the very determined only by subscription or at the odd desert-town gas station or the occasional hipster boutique, its canary-yellow-covered, forty-four-page issues handed from one curious desert zealot to the next, word spreading faster than the printers could keep up with. It became a radio show, a podcast, a live performance. Now, for the first time—and including both classic and new, never-before-seen revelations—Desert Oracle has been bound between two hard covers and is available to you. Straight out of Joshua Tree, California, Desert Oracle is “The Voice of the Desert”: a field guide to the strange tales, singing sand dunes, sagebrush trails, artists and aliens, authors and oddballs, ghost towns and modern legends, musicians and mystics, scorpions and saguaros, out there in the sand. Desert Oracle is your companion at a roadside diner, around a campfire, in your tent or cabin (or high-rise apartment or suburban living room) as the wind and the coyotes howl outside at night. From journal entries of long-deceased adventurers to stray railroad ad copy, and musings on everything from desert flora, rumored cryptid sightings, and other paranormal phenomena, Ken Layne's Desert Oracle collects the weird and the wonderful of the American Southwest into a single, essential volume.

True Tales from Another Mexico

True Tales from Another Mexico
Author: Sam Quinones
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2001
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780826322968

Merges keen observation with astute interviews and storytelling in the search for an authentic modern Mexico, finding it in part with emigrants.

Hellacious California!

Hellacious California!
Author: Gary Noy
Publisher: Heyday Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781597144995

In 1855 an ex-miner lamented that nineteenth-century California "can and does furnish the best bad things," including "purer liquors...finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier courtezans [sic]" than anywhere else in America. Lured by boons of gold and other exploitable resources, California's settler population mushroomed under Mexican and early American control, and this period of rapid transformation gave rise to a freewheeling culture best epitomized by its entertainments. Hellacious California tours the rambunctious and occasionally appalling amusements of the Golden State: gambling, gun duels, knife fights, gracious dining and gluttony, prostitution, fandangos, cigars, con artistry, and the demon drink. Historian Gary Noy unearths myriad primary sources, many of which have never before been published, to spin his true tall tales that are by turns humorous and horrifying. Whether detailing the exploits of an inebriated stallion, gambling parlors as a reinforcement and subversion of racial norms, armed skirmishes over eggs, or the ins and outs of the "Spirit Lover" scam, Noy expertly situates these stories in the context of a live-for-the-moment society characterized by audacity, bigotry, and risk. Published in collaboration with Sierra College Press.

Weird California

Weird California
Author: Greg Bishop
Publisher: Sterling Publishing Company Incorporated
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2006-03-01
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1402733844

THE WEIRD SERIES What’s weird around here? That’s a question Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman have enjoyed asking for years—and their offbeat sense of curiosity led them to create the best-selling phenomenon, Weird N.J. But why should they stop at New Jersey when there’s so much that’s peculiar, odd, and utterly nutty across the whole U.S.? So the two Marks—along with several other writers with a taste for the strange—have focused on some key locales, giving each of them the full “New Jersey” treatment. Spanning the breadth of the country, from New York to California, these are travel guides of a sort, but to the kind of places voyagers will never find on their everyday maps. Instead, they’re chock-full of local legends, crazy characters, cursed roads, and bizarre roadside attractions. So come along and join the fun: Some of what’s out there is disturbing, some hilarious, but all of it is unforgettably…weird. Praise for WEIRD N.J.: “They are the chroniclers of the creepy, bards of the bizarre…From abandoned asylums to colorful real-life characters past and present, to folk stories of ghosts, monsters, and aliens, Mr. Sceurman and Mr. Moran have created a journal of New Jersey’s unwritten history.”—The New York Times. “Enough with the head-severing mobsters of Jersey. The state is packed with far more evil than TV could ever invent—from satanic Klan rallies to time-traveling tree farmers. And Weird N.J. has the pictures to prove it.”—Rolling Stone. “Mark Sceurman and Mark Moran see their native state as others do not. For them, it is a demented Disneyland of worldly, and otherworldly, delights.”—The Boston Globe. “If it’s the offbeat, paranormal or downright weird that you crave…there could be no better place”—USA Today. Praise for Weird U.S. “Weird U.S. is delicious armchair reading. Who can resist an ax-wielding man in a bunny suit, a home shaped like a giant shoe, cannibal albino villages, midget colonies, passages to hell or close relations of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster?”—San Francisco Chronicle. “Weird U.S. is a marvelous work of entertainment and the basis for a truly unique vacation.”—Library Journal. “Kudos to Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman…This is the book by which future explorers will chart their road trips in pursuit of the meaning of this nation.”—New York Press.

Bodie’s Gold

Bodie’s Gold
Author: Marguerite Sprague
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2005-08-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0874178681

The Bodie Mining District was established in 1860 after the discovery of gold deposits in the area. Bodie’s largest boom ended ust over twenty years later, but the town survived into the twentieth century supported by a few small but steady mines. Mining ended with World War II. What remained of the town became a state park in 1964. In Bodie’s Gold, author Marguerite Sprague uncovers the original sources of information whenever possible, from the first mining claims to interviews with former Bodieites. Enhanced with numerous historic photographs and extracts from newspapers of that period, as well as by the reminiscences of former residents, the book offers a fascinating account of life in a Gold Rush boomtown.

Strange But True Tales of Car Collecting

Strange But True Tales of Car Collecting
Author: Keith Martin
Publisher: Motorbooks International
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2017-10-24
Genre: Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN: 0760353603

Collects true stories about eccentric car collectors, including a take of an English nobleman who buries his horde of Ferraris in an insurance scam and a woman who loved her car so much she wished to be buried in it.

Murder in Old Kentucky

Murder in Old Kentucky
Author: Keven McQueen
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2021-07-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253057493

Kentucky—land of bluegrass, horse racing, bourbon, and . . . murder. In Murder in Old Kentucky: True Crime Stories from the Bluegrass, Keven McQueen recounts dark and disturbing tales from the pages of Kentucky history, including the 1825 murder of Col. Solomon Sharp—a sordid affair that inspired Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Penn Warren—and the 1881 Ashland Tragedy, a heartbreaking murder of three innocent teenagers. This revised and expanded edition includes the story of a family terrorized by an arsonist who massacred eleven of their members and burned the property of even more, the tale of a husband and wife found shot in each other's arms with a life-sized photo of another man between them, and many more deaths that made headlines. Meticulously researched and written with McQueen's trademark humor, Murder in Old Kentucky will captivate any fan of true crime or Kentucky history.

Fascinating Short Stories For Curious Adults

Fascinating Short Stories For Curious Adults
Author: Jason Drew
Publisher: drew dally Publishers
Total Pages: 79
Release: 2022-11-28
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1959581252

Need to think of something fun to gifts your friends for Thanksgiving or stocking stuffers gifts for Christmas? Want to impress your friends at a gathering or sit out? Want to learn some fascinating facts about history, science, and the paranormal? If Yes, then this Fascinating Short Stories For Curious Adults is for you, you’ll have fun reading mind-blowing stories about the coolest things that will help you impress your friends and also improve your knowledge of things. Your friends will Wish they Knew this Stories Too.