The History Press

In early twentieth-century New York, few could have imagined a train terminal as grandiose as Pennsylvania Station.

Sandhogs would battle the fiercest of nature to build tunnels linking Manhattan to New Jersey and Long Island. For decades, Penn Station was a center of elegance and pride. But the ensuing rise of the airplane and automobile began to diminish train travel. By the mid-1960s, the station was tragically destroyed. The loss inspired the birth of preservation laws in the city and the nation that would save other landmarks like Grand Central. Author Paul Kaplan recounts the trials and triumphs of New York's Penn Station.

Go on a thrilling treasure hunt through Oklahoma history, track down the James Gang's unrecovered plunder and discover the stories behind scores of other historic troves.

Oklahoma keeps her secrets. Adventurers combing the Wichita Mountains for the legendary Lost Cave with an Iron Door can slake their thirst at Cache Creek or Treasure Lake. In the tradition of French and Spanish explorers, miners and pioneers stashed their valuable discoveries along the Santa Fe Trail and the California Road. Chief Opothleyahola reportedly buried gold coins which could be worth more than $14 million today, while businessman Dr. John J. Hayes never returned from a Confederate refugee camp to reclaim his hidden fortune. From the fabled funds of the Knights of the Golden Circle to the precious cargo of sunken steamboats, W. Craig Gaines follows the money across 60 Oklahoma counties.

In the early morning of September 8, 1755, a force of French Regulars, Canadians and Indians crouched unseen in a ravine south of Lake George.

Under the command of French general Jean-Armand, Baron de Dieskau, the men ambushed the approaching British forces, sparking a bloody conflict for control of the lake and its access to New York's interior. Against all odds, British commander William Johnson rallied his men through the barrage of enemy fire to send the French retreating north to Ticonderoga. The stage was set for one of the most contested regions throughout the rest of the conflict. Historian William Griffith recounts the thrilling history behind the first major British battlefield victory of the French and Indian War.

The author of Michigan's Haunted Lighthouses shares tales of disaster and misfortune on the Great Lakes.

Losing one's life while tending to a Great Lakes lighthouse sadly wasn't such an unusual occurrence. Death by murder, suicide or other tragic causes--while rare--were not unheard of. Two keepers on Lake Superior's Grand Island disappeared one early summer day in 1908, their decomposed remains found weeks later. A newly hired and some say depressed keeper on Pilot Island in Wisconsin's Door County slit his own throat after a consultation with a local butcher about the location of the jugular vein. A smallpox outbreak in the late 1890s led to the tragic death of a lighthouse hired hand on South Bass Island in Lake Erie.

Join author Dianna Stampfler as she uncovers the facts (and debunks some fiction) behind some of the Great Lakes' darkest lighthouse tales.

Spellbinding cases of mayhem from the Great Lake State

Blanketed by forests, dotted by lakes, crisscrossed by rivers and surrounded by Great Lakes, Michigan is a good place to hide secrets, bury bodies and stash evidence. Dig deep enough, and you will unearth something sinister. Is the suicide note of a prominent Detroit physician also a confession to murder? Were inmates unlawfully released from Jackson State Penitentiary to carry out a contract killing on a politician before he could turn State's evidence? Who silenced a fiery radio personality known as "the voice of the people'?? Did a notorious serial killer stalk women in Lansing during the 1970s?

Join true crime author Tobin T. Buhk as he excavates some of the most vexing unsolved crimes in Michigan history.

The first Europeans to arrive in the Ohio Valley were intrigued and puzzled by the many conical earthen mounds they encountered there. They created wild theories about who the mysterious "mound builders" might be.

It was not until the 1880s that Smithsonian Institution investigations revealed that the mound builders were the ancestors of living Native Americans. More than four hundred mounds have been recorded in West Virginia, including the Grave Creek Mound in Marshall County, once the largest conical mound in North America. Join archaeologist Darla Spencer and learn about the Grave Creek Mound and sixteen additional Adena mounds and groups of mounds from the fascinating Woodland period in West Virginia.

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.

Prior to the Civil War, thousands escaped slavery via the Underground Railroad. Untold others failed in the attempt.

These unfortunate souls were dragged into bondage via the Reverse Underground Railroad, as it came to be called. With more lines on both roads than any other state, the Free State of Ohio became a hunting ground for slavecatchers and kidnappers who roamed the North with impunity, seeking “fugitives” or any person of color who could be sold into slavery. And when they found one, they would kidnap their victim and head south to reap the reward.

David Meyers and Elise Meyers Walker, authors of Historic Black Settlements of Ohio, reveal not only the terror and injustice but also the bravery and determination born of this dark time in American history.

Four decades after Jeannette DePalma's tragic death, authors Jesse P. Pollack and Mark Moran present the definitive account of the shocking Springfield township cold case.

As Springfield residents decorated for Halloween in September 1972, the crime rate in the quiet, affluent township was at its lowest in years. That mood was shattered when the body of sixteen-year-old Jeannette DePalma was discovered in the local woods, allegedly surrounded by strange objects. Some feared witchcraft was to blame, while others believed a serial killer was on the loose. Rumors of a police cover up ran rampant, and the case went unsolved - along with the murders of several other young women.

Railroads are central in the history of Georgia. Explore 200 years of railroad expansion and consolidation in this must-read for railroad and Georgia history fans.

Before the start of the Civil War, Georgia had ten railroads, five of which figured significantly in General William T. Sherman's Atlanta Campaign and March to the Sea.

The number of rail lines in the state ballooned after the war. Many were founded by individual entrepreneurs like Henry Plant and Thomas Clyde, while the biggest railroad of them all (Southern Railway) was created out of whole cloth by New York financier J.P. Morgan. At the close of the nineteenth century, consolidation was already in process, and by the end of the next century, only three significant railroads remained in Georgia.

Author and historian Robert C. Jones examines Georgia's rail history over the past two centuries and today.

In 1974, one of San Francisco's most horrific unsolved serial murder cases began.

In less than two years, the man police called "The Doodler'? took at least five lives, terrorized the LGBTQ community, and left three survivors forever changed. Initial reports claimed the murderer didn't approach his victims with the knife he used to kill them, but that the suspect shared skilled drawings--sketches of faces and animals--before leaving several gay men to bleed out in the sands of Ocean Beach. Police investigations and activist efforts to uncover the killer led to several suspects, but no definitive identification of the artist of death.

Author Kate Zaliznock shines a light on this riveting cold case.

The only state born as a result of the Civil War, West Virginia was the most divided state in the nation. About forty thousand of its residents served in the combatant forces about twenty thousand on each side.

The Mountain State also saw its fair share of battles, skirmishes, raids and guerrilla warfare, with places like Harpers Ferry, Philippi and Rich Mountain becoming household names in 1861. When the Commonwealth of Virginia seceded from the Union on April 17, 1861, leaders primarily from the northwestern region of the state began the political process that eventually led to the creation of West Virginia on June 20, 1863. Renowned Civil War historian Mark A. Snell has written the first thorough history of these West Virginians and their civil war in more than fifty years.

More than four decades after it occurred, the murder of Athalia Ponsell Lindsley remains notorious… and unsolved.

The only eyewitness said a man attacked Lindsley with a machete in broad daylight on the front steps of her white mansion. Gossip swirled that neighbor Frances Bemis knew who killed Lindsley and would notify authorities. Bemis was later murdered on her nightly walk. Author Elizabeth Randall puts the rumors to rest through research culled from over one thousand pages of depositions, records, official county documentation and interviews.