DWD's Reviews

Published in 2025 by Hourly History . There are a few towns whose names are synonymous with the Old West, such as Dodge City, Kansas and Tombstone, Arizona. Deadwood, South Dakota is one of those names. It keeps on coming up in novels and movies. It brings to mind smoke-filled bars with poker games, gold rushes, Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok.  This was Deadwood's wild and turbulent beginning and this short e-book covers that well. But, it also covers the part that no one ever mentions - what does a small, out of the way city do when the gold rush is over and the saloons and casinos have moved on? To be honest, I hadn't really thought much about post-gold rush Old West cities. But, I have seen the same problem back in the Midwest where I live. Instead of gold mines that petered we had a manufacturing boom that has been in steady decline for 60 years. Factories close, the supporting businesses follow, and a dying town is left in their wake. What happened to Deadwood is not a...

Published in 2019 by Hourly History. What is popularly known as The Gilded Age (roughly from 1870 to 1900) was more than just an era of ostentatious wealth contrasted with crushing poverty. It was mostly a time if immense cultural and technological change and could easily be considered the beginnings of the modern world. This short e-book does a first-rate job of giving the broad strokes of the amazing breadth of changes - changes to communication with the telephone, to transportation with the increased number of trains, but also with the invention of the automobile. Steel became a common construction material and the first skyscraper was built.  None of this industrialization came smoothly, though. The United States went from being an overwhelmingly agrarian society where people worked on family farms or plantations (free, slave, or sharecropper) to being mostly working at paid positions in factories, stores, etc.  On top of that, a record amount of immigrants came to th...

Published by Hourly History in November of 2024. Hourly History offers free e-books every week. Each of the books take about an hour to read and the smaller topics are really quite good. The series is good for things you want to know more about, but you don't want to read a 400 page book on the topic. There is probably a large book about Wild Bill Hickock (1839-1876), but I don't want to read it. This length made for a perfectly enjoyable and interesting read. Hickock started out fighting in the pre-Civil War Bleeding Kansas conflict on the anti-slavery side, worked as a guide, a hunter, a sheriff, and eventually ended up being shut in the back of the head while playing poker in Deadwood in the Dakota Territory by a man who was too afraid to fight Hickock in a duel. I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Wild Bill Hickock: A Life from Beginning to End . 

 Published by Fulcrum Publishing in 2014. Artist and author Joel Christian Gill is writing and illustrating a series of graphic novels that look into the lives of lesser known, exceptional African Americans. His inspiration is this quote from W.E.B. DuBois: "The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth saving up to their vantage ground." In other words, some will rise up and inspire/lead the rest. This is Gill's way of providing inspiration. Bass Reeves was a legendary lawman in the Old West. He was a Deputy U.S. Marshal that chased down bad guys who would flee into Indian Territory (Oklahoma and Kansas) to hide from law enforcement in the neighboring states. If you've seen either of the two versions of the movie True Grit, that is the exact situation. The character Rooster Cogburn would have been real-life Bass Reeves' co-worker if Cogburn were a real person. The graphic novel tells about Reeves' childhood as a slave in Arkansas, how he escaped durin...

Published in 2021 by Next Chapter Audio LTD. Read by Crawford B. Bunkley III. Duration: 4 hours, 34 minutes. Unabridged. I have no idea where I found this book. I think it was a freebie on Audible through Amazon's Prime Reading program. I know that I got it because I am a big reader of Civil War histories and fiction and this sounded like it was right up my alley. Synopsis: The description of this book is accurate, to a point. It is about a freed slave who joins the Union Army and then goes from job to job and place to place with a goal of settling in Africa. My Review: This book is basically a Forrest Gump type of story - one man goes on an epic journey and ends up going through a lot of the historical movements of the era. Warning: Lots of *********SPOILERS********all the way to the end of this review. This audiobook comes in at almost exactly 50% of the run time for FORREST GUMP   and covers maybe even more territory. Our hero (his name changes multiple times) begins as a slave...

  Published in 2007. Heather Cox Richardson is a historian I have only recently discovered because of her prolific social media presence that she developed while under Covid lockdown. She writes a daily news summary of a few paragraphs with a view towards how these events match up with historical events or trends. Plus, she takes questions from people and develops a one hour daily online lecture. They are interesting, sometimes rambling little presentations and this book shares a lot of the same features.  In West from Appomattox , Richardson is looking at the time right after the Civil War in American History.  In the history books, Reconstruction, the Old West, the Gilded Age and the Spanish-American War are all treated a separate things. Combining all of these typical divisions of American history into one book makes for a more comprehensive study of the time period.  Teddy Roosevelt (center with glasses) and the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War Traditiona...

Could have been so much more Published in 2010 by Central Oregon Books, LLC The Sandy Knoll Murder brought a certain type of partnership you come across on those old TV lawyer shows. Perry Mason had Paul Drake. Ben Matlock had Tyler Hudson, Conrad McMasters and Cliff Lewis. What did they have? Tremendous investigators - researchers that covered the whole thing and then turned it over to someone else to make it sound nice for the judge and the jury. Melany Tupper has thoroughly investigated (and thoroughly documented) the murder of John Creed Conn in 1904. She is a great investigator, especially considering that the murder happened more than 100 years ago. Here are the basics: Conn was a frontier businessman who disappeared, presumed to have committed suicide or accidentally drowned but than his body suddenly appeared on Sandy Knoll 7 weeks later. At the same time, sheep were being slaughtered dozens and sometimes even hundreds at a time in yet another confrontation between c...