A 1900s New York portrait that's "an evocative and valuable reminder . . . of one unrelenting individual's ability to make a difference" ( New York Times ).Before publishing How the Other Half Lives—a photojournalistic investigation into the poverty of New York's tenement houses, home to three quarters of the city's population—Jacob Riis was an itinerant laborer until he landed a job as a muckraking reporter. Expe...

The revised and updated third edition of The Making of Urban America includes seven new articles and a richly detailed historiographical essay that discusses the vast urban history literature added to the canon since the publication of the second edition. The authors’ extensively revised introductions and the fifteen reprinted articles trace urban development from the preindustrial city to the twentieth-century city. With emphasis on the social, economic, political, commercial, and cultura...

On a Sunday morning in early 1892, Reverend Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst ascended to his pulpit at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church in New York and delivered one of the most explosive sermons in the city's history. Municipal life, he charged, was morally corrupt. Vice was rampant. And the city's police force and its Tammany Hall politicians were"a lying, perjured, rum-soaked, and libidinous lot." Denounced by city and police officials as a self-righteous "blatherskite," Parkhurst resolve...

A brilliant, authoritative, and fascinating history of America’s most puzzling era, the years 1920 to 1933, when the U.S. Constitution was amended to restrict one of America’s favorite pastimes: drinking alcoholic beverages.From its start, America has been awash in drink. The sailing vessel that brought John Winthrop to the shores of the New World in 1630 carried more beer than water. By the 1820s, liquor flowed so plentifully it was cheaper than tea. That American...

From the bestselling author of The Last Emperor comes this rip-roaring history of the government’s attempt to end America’s love affair with liquor—which failed miserably. On January 16, 1920, America went dry. For the next thirteen years, the Eighteenth Amendment prohibited the making, selling, or transportation of “intoxicating liquors,” heralding a new era of crime and corruption on all levels of society. Instead of eliminating alcohol, Prohibition spurred more drinking than ev...

THE CLASSIC NATIONAL BESTSELLER"A wonderful, splendid book—a book that should be read by every American, student or otherwise, who wants to understand his country, its true history, and its hope for the future." –Howard FastHistorian Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, a landmark work of social history, chronicles American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official narrative taught in schools—w...

The National Book Award–winning biography that tells the story of how young Teddy Roosevelt transformed himself from a sickly boy into the vigorous man who would become a war hero and ultimately president of the United States, told by master historian David McCullough.Mornings on Horseback is the brilliant biography of the young Theodore Roosevelt. Hailed as “a masterpiece” (John A. Gable, Newsday), it is the winner of the Los Angeles Times

In Parting the Waters, the first volume of his essential America in the King Years series, Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch gives a “compelling…masterfully told” (The Wall Street Journal) account of Martin Luther King’s early years and rise to greatness.Hailed as the most masterful story ever told of the American Civil Rights Movement, Parting the Waters is destined to endure for generations.Moving from the fiery political bapt...

" Presidential hanky-panky is as old as the nation itself. But no one can bring it to life quite like Larry Flynt." —Steven E. Levingston, Washington PostBen Franklin saved the American Revolution by seducing French Women. A gay love affair between President James Buchanan and Senator William King aided the secession movement. Woodrow Wilson's girlfriend dictated his letters to the German Kaiser. And lesbian relationships inspired Eleanor Roosevelt to beco...

From a New York Times bestselling author comes a "guided tour" of the presidents of the United States.From the heated debates among the framers of the Constitution in 1787 over an "elected king," to the creation of the presidency, and on through rich profiles of each man who has held the office, author Kenneth C. Davis examines each chief executive, from the low lights to the bright lights, the memorable to the forgettable and the forgotten. Davis offers r...

The office of the American President has evolved dramatically over the last 200 years, from George Washington's heroic posturing as leader of a renegade nation, to calculated cunning as commander of a nuclear superpower. This colourful inventory of presidential transgressions reveals that every modern scandal is the descendant of remarkably similar predecessors. Detailing the disgraces of all forty-four Presidents, from sexual skirmishes to CIA cover-ups, Dark History of the American P...

The presidential election of 1920 was one of the most dramatic ever. For the only time in the nation's history, six once-and-future presidents hoped to end up in the White House: Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, and Theodore Roosevelt. It was an election that saw unprecedented levels of publicity -- the Republicans outspent the Democrats by 4 to 1 -- and it was the first to garner extensive newspaper and newsreel coverage. It wa...