A guide to a variety of witty, informative walking tours in New York CityWhether you're a tourist or a native New Yorker, you will appreciate this witty, informative walking guide to New York City, as authors Seth Kamil and Eric Wakin peel back the layers of New York's most popular neighborhoods. Here in one volume are their award-winning tours. In their "Immigrant New York" tour you can take a walk on the Bowery, the most infamous street in the city and learn how ...

"A pleasing variety of Manhattan neighborhoods come to life in Block's solid anthology. . . . The writing is of a high order and a nice mix of styles." — Publishers WeeklyNew York City's main borough becomes the centerpiece for a collection of noir tales that celebrates its appeal, its arrogance, its diversity—and its darkness. From Battery Park to Harlem, the Lower East Side to the Upper West, Manhattan Noir delves below the island's glittering f...

The New History in an Old Museum is an exploration of "historical truth" as presented at Colonial Williamsburg. More than a detailed history of a museum and tourist attraction, it examines the packaging of American history, and consumerism and the manufacturing of cultural beliefs. Through extensive fieldwork—including numerous site visits, interviews with employees and visitors, and archival research—Richard Handler and Eric Gable illustrate how corporate sensibility blends with ...

An insider's "indispensible" behind-the-scenes history of the transit system of San Francisco and surrounding counties ( Houston Chronicle).In the first-ever history book about BART, longtime agency spokesman Michael C. Healy gives an insider's account of the rapid transit system's inception, hard-won approval, construction, and operations, warts and all.With a master storyteller's wit and sharp attention to detail, Healy recreates the politically ...

Davenport's report, like his series on the work house and the lunatic asylum on Blackwell's Island, gives a good account of how orphans and the children of the poor and the indigent were handled in mid nineteenth century America. Bits of the history of social work is revealed in all three pieces.

Why an anthology of fiction, poetry, and essay on Montauk?One of the world’s great fishing ports; site of the first cattle ranch in the US; refuge for Teddy Roosevelt’s Roughriders back from San Juan Hill; rum-runner headquarters during Prohibition; very nearly the Miami Beach of the north; site of the premier US lighthouse; home to unique, endangered species and second home to generations of New York firefighters, police, teachers, artists, and writers; a major defense installation during Wo...

Coronado National Memorial explores forgotten pathways through Montezuma Canyon in southeastern Arizona, and provides an essential history of the southern Huachuca Mountains. This is a magical place that shaped the region and two countries, the United States and Mexico. Its history dates back to the expedition led by Conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado in 1540, a mere forty-eight years after Columbus’ first voyage. Before that time Native Americans occupied the land, later ...

Celebrating Alaska’s 50-year statehood anniversary, Bridges to Statehood features the last territorial governor, Mike Stepovich.Over the Chilkoot Trail’s icy steps, these immigrants came—Stepovich, Butrovich, Dapcevich, Begich, Paskvan, and Peratrovich—to guide Alaska from a raw land to statehood, from southeast to the arctic, from gold camps to the forty-ninth star! Names so Alaskan that their Slavic stories went untold, they represented the world’s former empires and today’s Balka...

Even in the most hectic, most busy, most never-sleeping city in the world, comfort for the heart, mind, and soul is only a step away. And here's your quick-and-easy guide to finding it. Spiritual Places In and Around New York City is your roadmap to the myriad spaces and places around the boroughs that soothe the psyche and gladden the spirit, as well as a few extraordinarily peaceful destinations worth venturing over the city line for. From restful gardens to quiet galleries to r...

How the places in Brooklyn got their names--complete with vivid photographs and mapsFrom Bedford-Stuyvesant to Williamsburg, Brooklyn's historic names are emblems of American culture and history. Uncovering the remarkable stories behind the landmarks, Brooklyn By Name takes readers on a stroll through the streets and places of this thriving metropolis to reveal the borough's textured past.Listing more than 500 of Brooklyn's most prominent pla...

In Turning South Again the distinguished and award-winning essayist, poet, and scholar of African American literature Houston A. Baker, Jr. offers a revisionist account of the struggle for black modernism in the United States. With a take on the work of Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute surprisingly different from that in his earlier book Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Baker combines historical considerations with psychoanalysis, personal memoir, and ...

In Giant Country Don Graham brings together a collection of lively, absorbing essays written over the past two decades.The collection begins with a twist on book introductions that sets the tone for the essays to come—a self-interview conducted poolside at an eccentric Houston motel favored by regional rock bands. Over piña coladas the author works on his tan and discusses timeless Texas themes: the transition of the state from a rural to an urban world, the sense of a van...