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Subways and yellow taxis may be the icons of New York transportation, but it is the bicycle that has the longest claim to New York's streets: two hundred years and counting. Never has it taken to the streets without controversy: 1819 was the year of the city's first bicycle and also its first bicycle ban. Debates around the bicycle's place in city life have been so persistent not just because of its many uses-recreation, sport, transportation, business-but because of changing conceptions of who...

In April 1962, President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy hosted forty-nine Nobel Prize winners - along with many other prominent scientists, artists, and writers - at a famed White House dinner. Among the guests were J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was officially welcomed back to Washington after a stint in the political wilderness; Linus Pauling, who had picketed the White House that very afternoon; William and Rose Styron, who began a fifty-year friendship with the Kennedy family that night; James Baldwin...

Jones Beach looms large in the hearts and lives of millions of New Yorkers. From its windswept beginnings on the far edge of an empire to its 20th-century status as the greatest public beachfront resort in America, Jones Beach State Park has been home to countless memories. This accessible illustrated history tells its story via the personalities that shaped it--charming pirate Thomas Jones, for whom the beach was named; powerful master builder Robert Moses, whose promise to provide a refuge to...

Even before he was shot dead on the stairway of the tony Grand Central Hotel in 1872, financier James “Jubilee Jim” Fisk, Jr., was a notorious New York City figure. From his audacious attempt to corner the gold market in 1869 to his battle for control of the geographically crucial Erie Railroad, Fisk was a flamboyant exemplar of a new financial era marked by volatile fortunes and unprecedented greed and corruption. But it was his scandalously open affair with a showgirl named Josie Mansfield tha...

Among NYC's many treasures is Greenwich Village, a Bohemian area filled with creativity and rebellion. Haunted Greenwich Village, a collection of stories of ghosts, mysteries, and paranormal happenings in Greenwich Village, will leave readers delightfully frightened.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to be English and Catholic was to face persecution, financial penalties, and sometimes death. Yet some English Catholics prospered, reconciling their faith and loyalty to their country. Among the most prominent was George Calvert, a talented and ambitious man who successfully navigated the politics of court and became secretary of state under King James I. A conforming Protestant from the age of twelve, Calvert converted back to Catholicism when a poli...

See New Jersey history as you read about it! Envisioning New Jersey brings together 650 spectacular images that illuminate the course of the state's history, from prehistoric times to the present. Readers may think they know New Jersey's history - the state's increasing diversity, industrialization, and suburbanization - but the visual record presented here dramatically deepens and enriches that knowledge. Maxine N. Lurie and Richard F. Veit, two leading authorities on New Jersey history, prese...

The Gettysburg Campaign and its culminating battle have generatedmore than their share of analysis and published works. In My Gettysburg, Civil War scholar and twenty-six-year Gettysburg resident Mark Snell goes beyond the campaign itself to explore the "culture" of the battlefield. In this fascinating collection, Snell provides an intriguing interpretation of some neglected military aspects of the battle, such as a revisionist study of Judson Kilpatrick's decision to launch ""Farnsworth's Char...

At the turn of the 20th century, the circus was the most popular form of American entertainment, and New York City was the hub of circus-related activity. Featuring superb archival photography, this book documents a wide variety of ephemera, images, and artifacts relating to the history of the circus in the city, from the seminal equestrian displays of the 18th century to the iconic railroad circuses of the late 19th century. Matthew Wittmann offers a thorough history of the circus in New York C...

In the 1970s, Manhattan’s west side waterfront was a forgotten zone of abandoned warehouses and piers. Though many saw only blight, the derelict neighborhood was alive with queer people forging new intimacies through cruising. Alongside the piers’ sexual and social worlds, artists produced work attesting to the radical transformations taking place in New York. Artist and writer David Wojnarowicz was right in the heart of it, documenting his experiences in journal entries, poems, photographs, fil...

The poignant, personal, and unbelievably true story of Mrs. Robert E. Lee and General Montgomery Meigs, and the founding of the Arlington National Cemetery, in the midst of America's greatest struggle--the Civil War. Mrs. Lee's Rose Garden is the intensely personal story of Arlington National Cemetery's earliest history as seen through the lives of three people during the outbreak of the Civil War: Mary Ann Randolph Custis Lee, Robert E. Lee, and Montgomery C. Meigs. With all the majesty and pat...

A lot of things started in Indiana the automotive industry for one and Indiana has produced a great many ideas, many wrong headed and some downright wicked. Viewed one way, this book is a study of Indiana ideas, for threads run through it the guest for the better life, bigotry, provincial protest. Viewed another, it is a study of an idea itself, the Hoosier, or Indiana, idea. By the Indiana idea I mean the idea of Indiana and the Hoosiers that is held by people elsewhere. It is a conception of I...