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...

The story of the disastrous attempt to outlaw alcohol: “Informative and entertaining from start to finish” (Publishers Weekly).A companion to the A&E show, this is a rip-roaring history of the US government’s attempt to end America’s love affair with liquor—which failed miserably. On January 16, 1920, America went dry thanks to the passage of the Volstead Act. For the next thirteen years, the Eighteenth Amendment prohibited the making, selling, or transpor...

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...

" 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...

Watergate. Billygate. Iran-Contra. Teapot Dome. Monica Lewinsky.American history is marked by era-defining misdeeds, indiscretions, and the kind of tabloid-ready scandals that politicians seem to do better than anyone else. Now, for the first time, one volume brings together 300 years of political wrongdoing in an illustrated history of politicians gone wild—proving that today’s scoundrels aren’t the first, worst, and surely won’t be the last….From high crimes to misdemeanors to mo...

WINNER OF THE SOUTHERN BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR NONFICTION • “A landmark work of unflinching scholarship.”—The New York TimesThis extraordinary account of lynching in America, by acclaimed civil rights historian Philip Dray, shines a clear, bright light on American history’s darkest stain—illuminating its causes, perpetrators, apologists, and victims. Philip Dray also tells the story of the men and women who led the long and difficult fight to expose ...

In the year that saw the start of World War I, the United States was itself on the verge of revolution: industrial depression in the east, striking coal miners in Colorado, and increasingly tense relations with Mexico. "There was blood in the air that year," a witness later recalled, "there truly was."In New York, the year had opened with bright expectations, but 1914 quickly tumbled into disillusionment and violence. For John Purroy Mitchel, the city's new "boy mayor," the trouble...