Matt Furie's glorious first picture book — now in paperback, too! A nocturnal frog and rat wake at midnight, share a salad of lettuce and bugs, and strike off on an epic dirtbike adventure toward the sunrise. As the friends make their way from forest to bat cave to ghost town to ocean to shore and beyond, new friends are discovered, a huge crab is narrowly avoided, and a world is revealed. Packed with colorful characters and surprising details on every hand-drawn page, The Night Riders is the ideal book for anyone who has ever wanted to surf to the mountains on the back of a dolphin.

The Gold Bandits Struck with Impunity, But Zac Cobb Could Not Abide Injustice With rumors swirling around a series of stolen gold shipments, Wells Fargo sends Zachary Cobb to the California gold fields to investigate the unsolved robberies. A gang of vigilantes called the Vindicators have taken it upon themselves to prosecute men suspected of the hold-ups, but while innocent people are being lynched, the real bandits seem able to strike with impunity any time they choose.Maintaining his undercover status by visiting a cantakerous aunt who lives nearby, Zac discovers that the Vindicators are controlled by corrupt federal officials. He also discovers the judge to be a former commander of a Union prison camp where two of his brothers were imprisoned during the Civil War.Emily Morgan, whose fiancé was lynched by the vigilantes and whose brother is the local sheriff, helps Zac in his search. She is determined to bring all those involved to justice, even if it includes her own kin.But when Jenny Hays shows up at his aunt's house and is pulled into the mystery, Zac has much more than a dangerous investigation to solve!

During and after the days of slavery in the United States, one way in which slaveowners, overseers, and other whites sought to control the black population was to encourage and exploit a fear of the supernatural. By planting rumors of evil spirits, haunte

A notable and tragic case of the struggle between legal and social justice Reelfoot Lake has been a hunting and fishing paradise from the time of its creation in 1812, when the New Madrid earthquake caused the Mississippi River to flow backward into low-lying lands. Situated in the northwestern corner of the state of Tennessee, it attracted westward-moving pioneers, enticing some to settle permanently on its shores. Threatened in 1908 with the loss of their homes and livelihoods to aggressive, outsider capitalists, rural folk whose families had lived for generations on the bountiful lake donned hoods and gowns and engaged in “night riding,” spreading mayhem and death throughout the region as they sought vigilante justice. They had come to regard the lake as their own, by “squatters’ rights,” but now a group of entrepreneurs from St. Louis had bought the titles to the land beneath the shallow lake and were laying legal claim to Reelfoot in its entirety. People were hanged, beaten, and threatened and property destroyed before the state militia finally quelled the uprising. A compromise that made the lake public property did not entirely heal the wounds which continue to this day. Paul Vanderwood reconstructs these harrowing events from newspapers and other accounts of the time. He also obtained personal interviews with participants and family members who earlier had remained mum, still fearing prosecution. The Journal of American History declares his book “the complete and authentic treatment” of the horrific dispute and its troubled aftermath.