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Don't let the drawl fool you--Dallas boasts a dynamic history full of explosive growth. The cityscape itself seems eager to measure up to the outsized personalities that forged the town's identity. A sixty-seven-and-a-half-foot-tall giraffe statue greets visitors to the Dallas Zoo, while guests exiting the Joule Hotel encounter the gaze of a thirty-foot eyeball. A colossal Pegasus glows above it all from its perch on top of the Magnolia Petroleum building. Subtler storylines also thread their way through the forest of glass and steel, from the jazz of Deep Ellum alleyways to the peaceful paths of the Katy Trail. Author Georgette Driscoll looks beyond the inscriptions for the events that shaped Dallas into the city it is today.

The Steel City has boasted some of the most famous figures, landmarks and innovations in the country's history. Pittsburgh's past is littered with dozens of fascinating stories behind the icons that define it. Mary Schenley was the city's biggest benefactress of the nineteenth century, gifting the site of the 425-acre park in her name, but her fortune was almost lost when she eloped at the age of fifteen. The first ever call-in radio talk show began at famed KDKA in 1951, inspiring the birth of an entire industry. Mount Washington offers tourists sweeping views of the city today, but it once supplied coal to Pittsburghers and was the site of a sixteen-year underground mine fire. Author Paul King lists the best people, places and things of Pittsburgh's grand history.

Lake Shore Cemetery evolved as a burial ground of necessity rather than intention. The cemetery's first interments were French fur trappers and Native Americans, but as migrating settlers began populating Lake Erie's shore and a community emerged, the need for a recognized burial site arose. The diminutive graveyard, also known as Avon Lake Cemetery, claims less than one-third of an acre abutting the shoreline cliff. It holds the remains of a Revolutionary War soldier, sailors wounded in the Battle of Put-in-Bay during the War of 1812, Civil War and World War I soldiers, and a World War II Flying Tigers crewman. Within this cemetery, pillars of the community and successful farmers share sod with a court-adjudicated drunkard, an alleged lunatic, and several who spent their last days in the county's poorhouse. Recognized as a historic landmark by the Avon Lake Historic Preservation Commission in 2013, all burial sites within Lake Shore Cemetery's grounds are claimed. The colorful stories of its permanent residents reveal the diverse nature of the community in which they lived and died.