Find out quirky facts and wacky trivia about Colorado.

Imaginative, ambitious people and hard, frontier living combined to create a fertile setting for staged collisions, con games, lost locomotives, and bizarre behavior.

From the New York Times bestselling author of White Rage, an unflinching, critical new look at the Second Amendment and how it has been engineered to deny the rights of African Americans since its inception. In The Second, historian and award-winning, bestselling author of White Rage Carol Anderson powerfully illuminates the history and impact of the Second Amendment, how it was designed, and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable. The Second is neither a “pro-gun” nor an “anti-gun” book; the lens is the citizenship rights and human rights of African Americans. From the seventeenth century, when it was encoded into law that the enslaved could not own, carry, or use a firearm whatsoever, until today, with measures to expand and curtail gun ownership aimed disproportionately at the African American population, the right to bear arms has been consistently used as a weapon to keep African Americans powerless--revealing that armed or unarmed, Blackness, it would seem, is the threat that must be neutralized and punished. Throughout American history to the twenty-first century, regardless of the laws, court decisions, and changing political environment, the Second has consistently meant this: That the second a Black person exercises this right, the second they pick up a gun to protect themselves (or the second that they don't), their life--as surely as Philando Castile's, Tamir Rice's, Alton Sterling's--may be snatched away in that single, fatal second. Through compelling historical narrative merging into the unfolding events of today, Anderson's penetrating investigation shows that the Second Amendment is not about guns but about anti-Blackness, shedding shocking new light on another dimension of racism in America.

This collection of 28 vignettes of famous lovebirds from Colorado's past includes such incendiary historical characters as Baby Doe and Horace Tabor, Molly Dorsey and Byron Sanford, and Cort Thompson and Mattie Silks. The couples were chosen because of their impact on the state's evolution and their propensity for drama. These real-life chatacters include pioneers, adventurers, gamblers, silver barons, and madams.

IF YOU THOUGHT THAT THE X-FILES WAS ONLY FICTION, THINK AGAIN! For as long as extraterrestrial and paranormal phenomena have been investigated, the official government response to any events deemed "otherworldly" or unexplainable has been well documented: DENIAL. Not because they aren't interested in UFOs, monsters, and psychic abilities -- but because they have their own secret agendas for using this knowledge. In this thoroughly researched compendium of conspiracies and cover-ups, the remarkable findings that have been documented (and supposedly debunked) by the governments of the United States, Great Britain, and the former Soviet Union are finally revealed, including Attempts by the U.S. Air Force to build a fleet of nuclear-powered flying saucers... The British military's files on the Loch Ness monster and other mysterious beasts... The Cold War race between the CIA and the KGB to create the perfect psychic spy/assassin... The real story behind the enigmatic "Men in Black," who terrify UFO witnesses into silence... For anyone who wants to know the truth -- or the truth behind the truth -- Strange Secrets is the ultimate resource to understanding exactly what the government doesn't want us to know -- and why they want to keep us in the dark.

A disloyal group of American soldiers, stashed, abused, and seething in a remote camp in Colorado, conspire to war against their own country. At their head: the only soldier convicted of treason in the U.S. during World War II. And then their fates take an only-in-America turn.

In 1895, an extraordinarily enigmatic faith healer emerged in the American West. An Alsatian immigrant and former cobbler, Francis Schlatter looked like popular depictions of Jesus, and it was said that his very touch could heal everything from migraines and arthritis to blindness and cancer. First in Albuquerque, and then in Denver, thousands flocked to him, hoping to receive his healing touch. Schlatter accepted no money for his work, behaved modestly, fasted heavily, and treated everyone, from wealthy socialites to impoverished immigrants, equally. He quickly captured national attention, and both the sick hoping to be cured and reporters hoping to expose a fraud hurried to Denver to see the celebrated healer. By November of 1895, it is estimated that Schlatter was treating thousands of people every day, and the neighborhood in which he was staying was overrun with the sick and lame, their families, reporters from across the country, and hucksters hoping to make a quick buck off the local attention. Then, one night, Schlatter simply vanished. Eighteen months later, his skeleton was reportedly found on a mountainside in Mexico’s Sierra Madre range, finally bringing Schlatter’s great healing ministry to an end. Or did it? Within hours of the announcement of Schlatter’s found remains, a long-haired man emerged in Cleveland to say that he was Francis Schlatter, and the next twenty-five years, several others claimed to be Denver’s great healer. In The Vanishing Messiah, a modern researcher painstakingly pieces together evidence from letters, newspaper reports, hospital records, mug shots, and published reminiscences of the healer to find out what really happened to Francis Schlatter after he left Denver in the middle of the night in November 1895. In doing so, David N. Wetzel uncovers a historical puzzle of lies, deception, and betrayal, and offers a tantalizing look into a nineteenth-century messiah and his twentieth-century reincarnations—one of whom may have been the healer himself.

Explores ghosts and haunted places, local legends, cursed roads, crazy characters, and unusual roadside attractions found in the United States.

Vignettes of colorful individuals who have had an impact on Colorado's history, including Zebulon Pike, Chief Ouray, Horace Tabor, Mollie Brown, Nicholas Creede, and cannibal Alferd Packer, whose judge said, "There was seven Democrats in Hinsdale County and you ate five of them!"

Rock music, since its pre-history in blues, country music and 40s and early 50s pop, through to the well-publicised excesses of touring bands of today, has left a legacy of thousands of weird and wonderful stories in its wake. We’ve all read about the Who’s Keith Moon driving a Rolls Royce into a hotel swimming pool, but far more bizarre tales of on-the-road mayhem have never been widely told. Likewise, Svengali-like managers have manipulated starstruck musicians since rock began, though hanging your well-known client from a third floor window was a less usual way of ensuring their loyalty. And just where was the stalled hotel lift in which all four Beatles, according to legend, were turned on to marijuana? There are the unsung heroes of rock – pioneering eccentrics who helped make the music what it is and ended up as mere footnotes in the history books. Men such as UK producer Joe Meek who created seminal classics from a bed-sit above a cleaners on the Holloway Road, and the New York DJ who originally coined the phrase ‘rock 'n’roll’ and died in alcoholic poverty. Not to mention the stories behind the stars: when Debbie Harry was a 'Playboy' Bunny, Paul Simon wrote ‘Homeward Bound’ on Widnes railway station in Lancashire, and the Gallagher brothers (so they claim) were petty thieves.