Rising from a Missouri boyhood and meager prospecting success to owning the most productive copper, silver, and gold mines in the world and being elected a United States senator, George Hearst (1820–91) spent decades veering between the heights of prosperity and the depths of financial ruin. In George Hearst: Silver King of the Gilded Age, Matthew Bernstein captures Hearst’s ascent, casting light on his actions during the Civil War, his tempestuous marriage to his cousin Phoebe, h...

If not for an unlikely alliance among a bespectacled cowboy, a former Confederate general, and a millionaire newspaper publisher, the Spanish-American War might never have been. How these three outsize characters—Theodore Roosevelt, Joseph “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, and William Randolph Hearst—helped ignite the war that established the United States’ offshore empire is the rousing tale that Matthew Bernstein tells in Team of Giants.From his days as a Dakota deputy sheriff, Th...

Both reason and religion have been acknowledged by scholars to have had a profound impacton the foundation and formation of the American regime. But the significance, pervasiveness,and depth of that impact have also been disputed. While many have approached the Americanfounding period with an interest in the influence of Enlightenment reason or Biblical religion,they have often assumed such influences to be exclusive, irreconcilable, or contradictory. Few...

Charley Flinn, otherwise known as “Mortimer,” was the craftiest criminal in frontier California. Upon his release from San Quentin State Prison in 1863, Mortimer quickly made up for lost time. He formed a gang of robbers in Virginia City, led a prison break in Northern California, and became the most wanted man in the Bay Area. Boldly outwitting both the police and the press, including the young investigative reporter Mark Twain, Mortimer escalated to wilder and wilder heists. But when he ...

Mervyn LeRoy Comes to Town is the first book devoted to the career of one of the director/producers who in the early years of sound cinema was instrumental in establishing the Hollywood model of production that would endure for more than half a century. As a director and producer, LeRoy was responsible for turning out more than sixty feature films in a career that spanned five decades; as a studio executive, he contributed substantially to the success of the industry during the ch...

The Devil, or Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Mephistopheles appears frequently as a character in literature. The figure of the Devil or Satan personifies evil. Many writers have incorporated Satan into their works and some of their characters tried to make a deal with the Devil and come up on the winning side. These are their stories: The Bottle Imp (Robert Louis Stevenson) The Sorrows of Satan (Marie Corelli) Satan's Diary (Leonid Andreyev) A Modern Mephistopheles (Louisa May Alcott) The Devi...