Idaho

Idaho Falls: The Untold Story of America's First Nuclear Accident

The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee

In this captivating book, Stewart Lee Allen treks three-quarters of the way around the world on a caffeinated quest to answer these profound questions: Did the advent of coffee give birth to an enlightened western civilization? Is coffee, indeed, the substance that drives history? From the cliffhanging villages of Southern Yemen, where coffee beans were first cultivated eight hundred years ago, to a cavernous coffeehouse in Calcutta, the drinking spot for two of India’s three Nobel Prize winners . . . from Parisian salons and cafés where the French Revolution was born, to the roadside diners and chain restaurants of the good ol’ U.S.A., where something resembling brown water passes for coffee, Allen wittily proves that the world was wired long before the Internet. And those who deny the power of coffee (namely tea-drinkers) do so at their own peril.

The Enders Hotel: A Memoir (River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize)

Massacre At Bear River: First, Worst and Forgotten

Rod Miller tells the story of the West's worst, but least remembered attack on Native Americans in Massacre at Bear River: First, Worst and Forgotten.

Although it has been largely ignored by historians, it was the war waged against the Shoshoni tribe that opened the book on Indian massacres in the West. The Shoshoni were victims of a bloodbath more extreme than that at Wounded Knee, and more deadly than the more famous slaughter at Sand Creek.

The Bear River Massacre, on January 29, 1863, claimed at least 250 Shoshoni lives and changed the culture of the natives who lived in the area along what later became the Utah-Idaho border.

The author provides a compelling narrative of the massacre and the events leading up to the bloody clash on a frozen riverbank in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Miller also explains why the massacre has remained in the historical shadows for 145 years while detailing the fight waged by Shoshonis and a few dedicated researchers to raise the event to its rightful place in Western history.

Idaho for the Curious: A Guide

Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family

On the last hot day of summer in 1992, gunfire cracked over a rocky knob in northern Idaho, just south of the Canadian border. By the next day three people were dead, and a small war was joined, pitting the full might of federal law enforcement against one well-armed family. Drawing on extensive interviews with Randy Weaver's family, government insiders, and others, Jess Walter traces the paths that led the Weavers to their confrontation with federal agents and led the government to treat a family like a gang of criminals.

This is the story of what happened on Ruby Ridge: the tragic and unlikely series of events that destroyed a family, brought down the number-two man in the FBI, and left in its wake a nation increasingly attuned to the dangers of unchecked federal power.

The Boys of Boise: Furor, Vice & Folly in an American City (Columbia Northwest Classics)

"Written in 1965 about a same-sex sexual scandal that occurred in 1955 in Boise, Idaho, John Gerassi's classic study depicts both middle America's traditional response to homosexuality and an era in the country's history before the modern gay rights movement really got underway. Because much of what Gerassi wrote about persists in today's struggles over gay and lesbian issues, his book still has much to tell us about how contemporary society reacts to, and misunderstands, homosexuality."--from the new Foreword by Peter Boag On the morning of November 2, 1955, the people of Boise, Idaho, were stunned by a screaming headline in the Idaho Daily Statesman, THREE BOISE MEN ADMIT SEX CHARGES. Time magazine picked up the story, reporting that a "homosexual underworld" had long operated in Idaho's staid capital city. The Statesman led the hysteria that resulted in dozens of arrests--including some highly placed members of the community--and sentences ranging from probation to life imprisonment. Peter Boag's Foreword places the book in historical perspective, summarizing the popular psychological theories and legal conceptions that helped to shape Gerassi's research. He discusses advances in Idaho's public approach to homosexuality and ways in which the provincialism chronicled by Gerassi persists to this day.

Plowed Under: Agriculture & Environment in the Palouse (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books)

In Plowed Under, Andrew P. Duffin traces the transformation of the Palouse region of Washington and Idaho from land thought unusable and unproductive to a wealth-generating agricultural paradise, weighing the consequences of what this progress has wrought. During the twentieth century, the Palouse became synonymous with wheat, and the landscape was irrevocably altered. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, native vegetation is almost nonexistent, stream water is so dirty that it is often unfit for even livestock, and 94 percent of all land has been converted to agriculture.

Commercial agriculture also created a less noticeable ecological change: soil erosion. While common to industrial agriculture nationwide, topsoil loss evoked different political and social reactions in the Palouse. Farmers all over the nation take pride in their freedom and independence, but in the Palouse, Duffin shows, this mentality - a remnant of an older agrarian past - has been taken to the extreme and is partly responsible for erosion problems that are among the worst in the nation.

In the hope of charting a better, more sustainable future, Duffin argues for a candid look at the land, its people, their decisions, and the repercussions of those decisions. As he notes, the debate is not over whether to use the land, but over what that use will look like and its social and ecological results.

Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910

In the summer of 1910, Northern Rockies wildfires scorched millions of acres in the West, darkened skies in New England, and deposited soot on the ice of Greenland. The flames ravaged pristine wilderness along with farms, towns, and mining camps, culminating in the deaths of seventy-eight firefighters in the Big Blowup along the Montana-Idaho border. The blazes also illuminated a national debate raging about fire policy. Year of the Fires is the fascinating story of that catastrophic year and its pivotal role in establishing how we deal with forest fire in this country. Everything from the tools firefighters carry to strategies of land management was shaped by the fires of 1910.
Stephen Pyne not only explains how the fires occurred, how they were fought, and who fought them, but also puts the event in the context of America s changing attitudes about forests and fires. In 1910 steam-powered trains were spewing sparks across the West while homesteaders were burning their way into the woods to create farms and settlements. Teddy Roosevelt had just doubled the size of the forest reserves, and the idea that timber is finite was just entering American consciousness. The Forest Service, only five years old, was struggling to solidify its role. And even as the country s first foresters were facing the question of how to protect the new public lands, the West exploded in fire. Pyne brings that astonishing year to life in a riveting narrative of the fires, the people, and the decisions that continue to affect American life.

The Teton Dam Disaster (ID) (Images of America)

While cameras rolled, the newly completed Teton Dam collapsed shortly before noon on June 5, 1976. The resulting wall of water, 80 billion gallons strong, battered town after town during its three-day rampage through the Upper Snake River Valley in eastern Idaho. Impounding the flood-prone Teton River, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation dam failed during the reservoir's initial fill, ripping homes from foundations, drowning thousands of livestock, and stripping acres of valuable topsoil. Amazingly only 11 lives were lost during the disaster, as most residents heeded the flood warnings. Presenting photographs from local newspapers, archives, museums, historical societies, and witnesses, this book documents the dam's spectacular failure, the tremendous damage, and the Herculean cleanup and rebuilding process following one of the worst engineering disasters of the last 50 years. Today the investigation into why the 305-foot-tall earth-fill dam crumbled-ironically a dam built for flood control-still prompts debate.