From West Palm Beach's beginnings as service town to Palm Beach, Standard Oil tycoon Henry Morrison Flagler's resort village, the city has evolved into a trendy art, cultural, and shopping mecca. Palm Beach County's largest city serves as county seat and center of business, government, and commerce. Taming America's last frontier saw the industriousness of pioneers and settlers such as Marion Gruber, the Potter brothers, George Lainhart, and Max Greenberg guide the "Cottage City" of yester...

A vivid biography of the nineteenth-century society couple who helped turn a tropical wilderness into a Gilded Age paradise.Palm Beach's sunny and idyllic shores had humble beginnings as a wilderness of sawgrass and swamps only braved by the hardiest of souls. Two such adventurers were Fred and Byrd "Birdie" Spilman Dewey, who pioneered in central Florida before discovering the tropical beauty of Palm Beach in 1887.Though their story was all but lost, this dy...

"A riveting account of one of the more startling episodes in the . . . history of race in America" ( Wall Street Journal).Ota Benga, a young African man, was featured as an exhibit at the St. Louis World's Fair. Two years later, the New York Zoological Gardens displayed him in its Monkey House, caging him with an orangutan. The attraction became an international sensation, drawing thousands of New Yorkers and commanding headlines from across the nation and ...

From the National Book Award-winning author of Slaves in the Family, a riveting true life/true crime narrative of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads.One hundred and thirty years ago Eadweard Muybridge invented stop-motion photography, anticipating and making possible motion pictures. He was the first to capture time and play it back for an audience, giving birth to visual media and scre...

Beyond Audubon: A quirky, "lively and illuminating" account of bird-watching's history, including "rivalries, controversies, [and] bad behavior" ( The Washington Post Book World).From the moment Europeans arrived in North America, they were awestruck by a continent awash with birds—great flocks of wild pigeons, prairies teeming with grouse, woodlands alive with brilliantly colored songbirds. Of a Feather traces the colorful origins of American bird...

The true story of a nineteenth-century elephant caught between warring circuses and battling scientists, from the author of The Book of Mychal.In 1903, on Coney Island, an elephant named Topsy was electrocuted. Many historical forces conspired to bring her, Thomas Edison, and those 6,600 volts of alternating current together that day. Tracing them all in Topsy, journalist Michael Daly weaves together a fascinating popular history, the first book t...

"What Moby-Dick is to whales, Brilliant Beacons is to lighthouses—a transformative account of a familiar yet mystical subject." —Laurence Bergreen, author of Columbus: The Four VoyagesIn this "magnificent compendium" (New Republic), best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin presents the definitive history of American lighthouses, and in so doing "illuminate[s] the history of America itself" (Entertainment Weekly). Treating read...

"The Today show co-host and weatherman writes a narrative history of the 1889 Johnstown flood, the deadliest in American history." — New York Times Book Review, "New & Noteworthy"Central Pennsylvania, May 31, 1889: After a deluge of rain—nearly a foot in less than twenty-four hours—swelled the Little Conemaugh River, engineers watched helplessly as swiftly rising waters threatened to breach the South Fork dam, built to create a private lake for a ...

Besides the towering figure of Barnum himself, this book's cast of characters includes not only Jenny Lind, Jumbo, and Tom Thumb, but also such ill-assorted figures a Chang and Eng (the original Siamese Twins), Queen Victoria herself, captive white whales, "The Feejee Mermaid," and Abraham Lincoln. This is far and away the best biography of one of the most fascinating of all Americans.

Explore real-life hauntings steeped in legend and truth with author and historian, Debra Glass, in this third collection of True Shoals Ghost Stories. The tales include, among others, the Civil War legend of a Winston County woman who refuses to rest until she wreaks vengeance on the men who murdered her husband, buried treasure guarded by a spectral horse, the mysterious bloodstains marring the floor of a remote Lauderdale County plantation, the tragic tale of a phantom mother who still s...

Two colorful characters and their unlikely friendship in early 20th century Savannah, Georgia: Ward Allen, a romantic and bombastic character who rejects his plantation heritage for the freedom of life on a river, and his long-time friend, a freed slave named Christmas Moultrie, fight for their rights as market hunters. Jack Cay grew up listening to stories about gun toting, Shakespeare quoting Allen from an elderly Christmas Moultrie. Jack collected them in a book and his son, John Cay, m...

The author of Legends & Lore of Cape Cod delves deeper into the colorful local history of Massachusetts's quaint seaside region.Cape Cod may be a popular tourist destination, but it has a strange and distinctive history. The Pukwudgies were two- to three-foot beings with smooth gray skin, hairy faces and horns. These shape-shifting, mischievous "little people" are connected to Wampanoag Indian mythology. Edward Rowe Snow, a New England historian who was al...