Albert M. Greenfield (1887-1967), an ambitious immigrant outsider, was courted for his business acumen by mayors, senators, governors, and presidents, including Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. As this feisty Russian Jew built a business empire that encompassed real estate, stores (including Bonwit Teller and Tiffany's), hotels (including the Ben Franklin and the Bellevue-Stratford), banks, newspapers, transportation companies, and even the Loft Candy Corporation, he challenged the ent...

First Published in 2003. This volume charts the history of anthracite coal mining industry and developments around the Josiah White rolling mill in Philadelphia, the Lehigh Coal Mining Company created in 1972 in Pennsylvania, Canal and railroad developments, John Leisenring and Sharpe, Leisenring and Co; and Westmoreland from 1794 to 1999.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • An unprecedented examination of how news stories, editorials and photographs in the American press—and the journalists responsible for them—profoundly changed the nation’s thinking about civil rights in the South during the 1950s and ‘60s.Roberts and Klibanoff draw on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen—black and white—revealed to a nation its most ...

New York Times Bestseller“Amity Shlaes’s new biography carries a different and highly relevant message. . . . Read Coolidge, and better understand the forces bearing on the President and Congress almost a century later.” — Paul Volcker“America’s 30th president has been much misunderstood. . . . Shlaes’s biography provides a window onto an unfairly tarnished period. It deserves to be widely read.”—The Economist

Learn everything you need to know about the Presidents of the United States from George Washington to George W. Bush with The Everything Kids’ Presidents Book.Did George Washington really cut down his father’s cherry tree? Who was the last president to have facial hair? Which US president had a country’s capital city named after him? Which president earned the nickname, “His Accidency?” With The Everything Kids’ Presidents Book, you’ll be at the h...

At its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, Detroit's status as epicenter of the American auto industry made it a vibrant, populous, commercial hub—and then the bottom fell out. Detroit : A Biography takes a long, unflinching look at the evolution of one of America's great cities and one of the nation's greatest urban failures. This authoritative yet accessible narrative seeks to explain how the city grew to become the heart of American industry and how its utter collapse—from ...

"The most comprehensive and comprehendible history of the West Virginia Coal War I've ever read." —John Sayles, writer and director of MatewanOn September 1, 1912, the largest, most protracted, and deadliest working-class uprising in American history was waged in West Virginia. On one side were powerful corporations whose millions bought armed guards and political influence. On the other side were fifty thousand mine workers, the nation's largest labor uni...

Eyes on the Prize traces the movement from the landmark Brown v*. the Board of Education* case in 1954 to the march on Selma and the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. This is a companion volume to the first part of the acclaimed PBS series.

Visiting Martin Luther King Jr. at the peak of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. "Just for self defense," King assured him. It was not the only weapon King kept for such a purpose; one of his advisors remembered the reverend's Montgomery, Alabama home as "an arsenal."Like King, many ostensibly "nonviolent" civil rights activists embraced their constitutional right to selfprotection -- yet this crucial dimension of the Afro...

On the evening of June 12, 1963 -- the day President John F. Kennedy gave his most impassioned speech about the need for interracial tolerance "Medgar Evers, the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi, was shot and killed by an assassin's bullet in his driveway. The still-smoking gun -- bearing the fingerprints of Byron De La Beckwith, a staunch white supremacist -- was recovered moments later in some nearby bushes. Still, Beckwith remained free for over thirty years, until Evers's w...

Company town: The very phrase sounds un-American. Yet company towns are the essence of America. Hershey bars, Corning glassware, Kohler bathroom fixtures, Maytag washers, Spam -- each is the signature product of a company town in which one business, for better or worse, exercises a grip over the population. In The Company Town, Hardy Green, who has covered American business for over a decade, offers a compelling analysis of the emergence of these communities and their role in shap...

This in-depth look at the civil rights movement goes to the places where pioneers of the movement marched, sat-in at lunch counters, gathered in churches; where they spoke, taught, and organized; where they were arrested, where they lost their lives, and where they triumphed.Award-winning journalist Charles E. Cobb Jr., a former organizer and field secretary for SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), knows the journey intimately. He guides us through Washington, D.C., Mar...