A vivid biography of the nineteenth-century society couple who helped turn a tropical wilderness into a Gilded Age paradise.Palm Beach's sunny and idyllic shores had humble beginnings as a wilderness of sawgrass and swamps only braved by the hardiest of souls. Two such adventurers were Fred and Byrd "Birdie" Spilman Dewey, who pioneered in central Florida before discovering the tropical beauty of Palm Beach in 1887.Though their story was all but lost, this dy...

From West Palm Beach's beginnings as service town to Palm Beach, Standard Oil tycoon Henry Morrison Flagler's resort village, the city has evolved into a trendy art, cultural, and shopping mecca. Palm Beach County's largest city serves as county seat and center of business, government, and commerce. Taming America's last frontier saw the industriousness of pioneers and settlers such as Marion Gruber, the Potter brothers, George Lainhart, and Max Greenberg guide the "Cottage City" of yester...

From the National Book Award-winning author of Slaves in the Family, a riveting true life/true crime narrative of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads.One hundred and thirty years ago Eadweard Muybridge invented stop-motion photography, anticipating and making possible motion pictures. He was the first to capture time and play it back for an audience, giving birth to visual media and scre...

The true story of a nineteenth-century elephant caught between warring circuses and battling scientists, from the author of The Book of Mychal.In 1903, on Coney Island, an elephant named Topsy was electrocuted. Many historical forces conspired to bring her, Thomas Edison, and those 6,600 volts of alternating current together that day. Tracing them all in Topsy, journalist Michael Daly weaves together a fascinating popular history, the first book t...

Apopka, Florida, started out as a place once dubbed "Big Potato" by the Native Americans of the area and was formerly known as the "Fern City," but it is now most notably considered the "Indoor Foliage Capitol of the World." Once-thriving fragrant citrus groves have been replaced by climate-controlled greenhouses and fields of landscaped nurseries and subdivisions. The second largest city in Orange County, Apopka is located in the northwest region of the county. It functions today as a bed...

The Seminoles once roamed the land that encompasses Wilton Manors, until Henry Flagler brought his East Coast Railway through the untamed wilderness in the late nineteenth century. By 1910, the railway had transformed the area into a viable farming and shipping hamlet known as Colohatchee, until a wealthy businessman began marketing the plot of land nestled between the North and South branches of the Middle River as a beautiful bedroom suburb of Fort Lauderdale. The 1926 housing market cra...

John James Audubon came to America as a dapper eighteen-year-old eager to make his fortune. He had a talent for drawing and an interest in birds, and he would spend the next thirty-five years traveling to the remotest regions of his new country–often alone and on foot–to render his avian subjects on paper. The works of art he created gave the world its idea of America. They gave America its idea of itself.Here Richard Rhodes vividly depicts Audubon’s life and career: his epic wande...

This book is a sequel to my first hotel book, Great American Hoteliers: Pioneers of the Hotel Industry AuthorHouse 2009. It tells the fascinating and unpredictable stories of seventeen hotel pioneers who were (and are) important in the development of the hotel industry in the United States. Many of them are relatively unknown and lost in the dustbin of American history. Their biographies comprise this sequel called Great American Hoteliers Volume 2: Pioneers of the Hotel Industry: Stewart ...

Explore real-life hauntings steeped in legend and truth with author and historian, Debra Glass, in this third collection of True Shoals Ghost Stories. The tales include, among others, the Civil War legend of a Winston County woman who refuses to rest until she wreaks vengeance on the men who murdered her husband, buried treasure guarded by a spectral horse, the mysterious bloodstains marring the floor of a remote Lauderdale County plantation, the tragic tale of a phantom mother who still s...

"What Moby-Dick is to whales, Brilliant Beacons is to lighthouses—a transformative account of a familiar yet mystical subject." —Laurence Bergreen, author of Columbus: The Four VoyagesIn this "magnificent compendium" (New Republic), best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin presents the definitive history of American lighthouses, and in so doing "illuminate[s] the history of America itself" (Entertainment Weekly). Treating read...

The history of York College of Pennsylvania begins shortly after the Revolutionary War. The college traces its lineage directly to three ancestral schools. The foundation was York County Academy, an English classical school chartered in 1787. The academy merged in 1929 with York Collegiate Institute, founded in 1873. Under one roof, both schools survived the Great Depression. In 1941, the charter was amended to allow two years of college-level courses and the institution became York Junior...

Simeon B. Chapin was an entrepreneur and visionary who, along with Franklin G. Burroughs, helped create the foundation of what is Myrtle Beach today. B.B. Benfield built and opened the area's first movie theater, and Lawrence Boulier was a landscape artist and founder of the Waccamaw Arts and Crafts Guild. John Woodside built the grand Ocean Forest Hotel. Col. H.B. Springs was the town's first insurance and real estate agent, and James Bryan Sr. was the first president of Myrtle Beach Farm...