From peglegged Peter Stuyvesant to CBGB’s, the story of the Bowery reflects the history of the city that grew up around it.It was the street your mother warned you about—even if you lived in San Francisco. Long associated with skid row, saloons, freak shows, violence, and vice, the Bowery often showed the worst New York City had to offer. Yet there were times when it showed its best as well.The Bowery is New York’s oldest street and Manhattan’s broadest boule...

From Jonas Bronck to today, discover stories and legends of New York's Bronx River.The Bronx River flows for twenty-three miles through Westchester County and the heart of the Bronx. It is New York City's only freshwater river, and it is exceptionally rich in history, folklore and environmental wonder. From Revolutionary War battlefields to native forests and lost villages, its lore and remarkable history are peopled with an array of legendary characters like Aaron...

Washington's Harrowing Escape from the Hudson ValleyIn October 1776 central Westchester witnessed a critical episode in the early campaign of George Washington's ragtag Continental Army and its quest for American independence. Often overlooked as just an interval between the disastrous Battle of Brooklyn and victory at Trenton, the Battle of White Plains showcased Washington's sly strategy of perseverance. Poor decision making and ignorance of the area's hilly terr...

It was the street your mother warned you about—even if you lived in San Francisco. Long associated with skid row, saloons, freak shows, violence, and vice, the Bowery often showed the worst New York City had to offer. Yet there were times when it showed its best as well.The Bowery is New York's oldest street and Manhattan's broadest boulevard. Like the city itself, it has continually reinvented itself over the centuries. Named for the Dutch farms, or bouweries, of the area...

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two million Jewish immigrants poured into America, leaving places like Warsaw or the Russian shtetls to pass through Ellis Island and start over in the New World. This is a "brilliant" account of their stories (the New York Times).Though some moved on to Philadelphia, Chicago, and other points west, many of these new citizens settled in New York City, especially in Manhattan's teeming tenements. Like others before and a...

We all know about Washington's crossing of the Delaware and Betsy Ross's stitching together the Stars and Stripes, but how about a little-known, valid reason for the war itself and why General George was able to survive a plague that wiped out many of his fellow countrymen?History buff Tim Rowland provides an entertaining look at happenings during and surrounding the Revolutionary War that you won't find in history books. He digs into the war's major events and reveals the unknown,...

Have you ever wondered why we wear the type of clothes we do? Packed with outlandish outfits, this exciting history of fashion trends reveals the flamboyant fashions adopted (and discarded) by our ancestors.In the days before cosmetic surgery, people used bum rolls and bombastic breeches to augment their figures, painted their faces with poisonous concoctions, and doused themselves with scent to cover body odor.Take a fresh look at history’s hidden fashion disasters and disco...

The Extraordinary Story of a Young Winston Churchill in the Boer War, as Told by His GranddaughterIn this lively biography of a dashing, brash twenty-five-year-old Churchill, Celia Sandys chronicles her celebrated grandfather's adventures as a correspondent and combatant during nine months of the Anglo-Boer War—events that took him from the bivouacs and battle sites of Transvaal to his incarceration as a prisoner of war in Pretoria and ultimately to a bold escape a...

Famous authors, like everybody else, know that one day they will die. Final Chapters tells the fascinating stories of more than one hundred writers' encounters with death—and their attitudes toward the Grim Reaper: fear, uncertainty, or acceptance.Francis Bacon wrote, "It is as natural to die as to be born," while Socrates told the judges who condemned him, "And now we go our ways, I to die and you to live. Which is better is known to God alone."Death often came in...

On September 15, 1944, the United States invaded the tiny Pacific island of Peleliu, located at the southern end of the Palau Islands. Boasting a large airfield from which the Americans could mount bomber campaigns, Peleliu was a strategically essential part of Gen. MacArthur's long-awaited liberation of the Philippines. With the famed 1st Marine Division making the amphibious assault, Pacific High Command was confident that victory would be theirs in just a few days.They were dras...

"Emma Griffin gives a new and powerful voice to the men and women whose blood and sweat greased the wheels of the Industrial Revolution" (Tim Hitchcock, author of Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London).This "provocative study" looks at hundreds of autobiographies penned between 1760 and 1900 to offer an intimate firsthand account of how the Industrial Revolution was experienced by the working class (the New Yorker). The era didn't just bring a...

In 1960 Argentina, a covert team of Israeli agents hunted down the most elusive war criminal alive: Adolf Eichmann, chief architect of the Holocaust. The young spy who tackled Eichmann on a Buenos Aires street—and fought every compulsion to strangle the Obersturmführer then and there—was Peter Z. Malkin. For decades Malkin's identity as Eichmann's captor was kept secret. Here he reveals the entire breathtaking story—from the genesis of the top-secret surveillance operation to the ...