This book provides an introduction to the whole engineering process of designing and constructing deep excavations in rock, including caverns, tunnels, shafts, and pits.The process is comprehensively covered from initial site planning, through design considerations such as the assessment of rock mass properties, the closure of contracts and resolution of disputes, and lastly onto the maintenance and final decommissioning or repurposing of underground facilities. The subject materia...

The life of Benedict Arnold, the American Revolutionary War general who attempted to surrender West Point to the British in 1780, didn't end after he betrayed his American compatriots. In the newly formed United States, he was condemned as a conspirator and in Britain, he was suspected of the same. He quickly left America, spent a short time in London, and largely operated in Canada and the Caribbean as a smuggler, a mercenary and a pariah.Although much has been written about Arnol...

The book describes the theory and current practices for design of earth lateral support for deep excavations in soil. It addresses basic principles of soil mechanics and explains how these principles are embodied in design methods including hand calculations. It then introduces the use of numerical methods including the fundamental “beam on springs” models, and then more sophisticated computer programmes which can model soil as a continuum in two or three dimensions. Constitutive relations...

Aaron Burr--Revolutionary War hero, third vice president of the United States and a controversial figure of the early republic--was tried and acquitted of treason charges in 1807, and thereafter departed for self-imposed exile in Europe, his political career in ruins. Adrift in Paris for 15 months, he led a marginal existence on the run from creditors and the courts, getting by on handouts. While other Americans in Paris enjoyed official status that insulated them from life in the capital,...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “richly imagined biography” (The New York Times Book Review) of General Alex Dumas, who rose from slavery to command vast armies in the French Revolutionary Wars—and whose exploits were immortalized in his son’s novels The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers“Fascinating [and] entertaining.”—The Wall Street Journal“Remarkable....

The #1 bestseller that tells the remarkable story of the generations of American artists, writers, and doctors who traveled to Paris, fell in love with the city and its people, and changed America through what they learned, told by America’s master historian, David McCullough.Not all pioneers went west.In The Greater Journey, David McCullough tells the enthralling, inspiring—and until now, untold—story of the adventurous American artists, ...

Writer, historian and poet Afua Cooper tells the astonishing story of Marie-Joseph Angélique, a slave woman convicted of starting a fire that destroyed a large part of Montréal in April 1734 and condemned to die a brutal death. In a powerful retelling of Angélique’s story -- now supported by archival illustrations -- Cooper builds on 15 years of research to shed new light on a rebellious Portuguese-born black woman who refused to accept her indentured servitude. At the same time, Cooper co...

The first major biography of one of France's most mysterious women--Marie Antoinette's only child to survive the French revolution.Susan Nagel, author of the critically acclaimed biography Mistress of the Elgin Marbles, turns her attention to the life of a remarkable woman who both defined and shaped an era, the tumultuous last days of the crumbling ancient régime. Nagel brings the formidable Marie-Thérèse to life, along with the age of revolution and the waning da...

The truth behind the legend of New Orleans' infamous slave owner, madwoman, and murderess, portrayed in the anthology series, American Horror Story.On April 10, 1834, firefighters smashed through a padlocked attic door in the burning Royal Street mansion of Creole society couple Delphine and Louis Lalaurie. In the billowing smoke and flames they made an appalling discovery: the remains of Madame Lalaurie's chained, starved, and mutilated slaves. This house...

Winner of the George Washington Book PrizeWinner of the Ambassador Award in American StudiesWinner of the Gilbert Chinard PrizeNamed a Notable Book of the Year by The New York TimesMichael Douglas stars in Franklin, streaming on Apple TV+In this dazzling work of history, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author follows Benjamin Franklin...

In this marvelous anecdotal history, Justin Kaplan––Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Mark Twain––vividly brings to life a glittering, bygone age.Endowed with the largest private fortunes of their day, cousins John Jacob Astor IV and William Waldorf Astor vied for primacy in New York society, producing the grandest hotels ever seen in a marriage of ostentation and efficiency that transformed American social behavior.Kaplan exposes it all in exquisite det...

Another fascinating book by the author of Brunelleschi’s Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling: a saga of artistic rivalry and cultural upheaval in the decade leading to the birth of Impressionism.If there were two men who were absolutely central to artistic life in France in the second half of the nineteenth century, they were Edouard Manet and Ernest Meissonier. While the former has been labelled the “Father of Impressionism” and is today...