From the bestselling author of Tulipomania comes Batavia’s Graveyard, the spellbinding true story of mutiny, shipwreck, murder, and survival.It was the autumn of 1628, and the Batavia, the Dutch East India Company’s flagship, was loaded with a king’s ransom in gold, silver, and gems for her maiden voyage to Java. The Batavia was the pride of the Company’s fleet, a tangible symbol of the world’s richest and most powerful commercial monopoly. She set...

A vivid narration of the history of the tulip, from its origins on the barren, windswept steppes of central Asia to its place of honor in the lush imperial gardens of Constantinople, to its starring moment as the most coveted—and beautiful—commodity in Europe.In the 1630s, visitors to the prosperous trading cities of the Netherlands couldn't help but notice that thousands of normally sober, hardworking Dutch citizens were caught up in an extraordinary frenzy of buy...

They called it Satan’s Circus—a square mile of Midtown Manhattan where vice ruled, sin flourished, and depravity danced in every doorway. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was a place where everyone from the chorus girls to the beat cops was on the take and where bad boys became wicked men; a place where an upstanding young policeman such as Charley Becker could become the crookedest cop who ever stood behind a shield.Murder was so common in the vice district that few people...

Before the notorious Five Families dominated U.S. organized crime, there was the one-fingered criminal genius Giuseppe Morello and his lethal coterie. Combining first-rate scholarship and pulse-quickening action, Mike Dash brings to life this little-known story, following the rise of the Mafia in America from the 1890s to the 1920s, from the villages of Sicily to the streets of Little Italy. Using an array of primary sources—hitherto untapped Secret Service archives, prison records, and in...

It was the autumn of 1628, and the Batavia, the Dutch East India Company's flagship, was loaded with a king's ransom in gold, silver, and gems for her maiden voyage to Java. The Batavia was the pride of the Company's fleet, a tangible symbol of the world's richest and most powerful commercial monopoly. She set sail with great fanfare, but the Batavia and her gold would never reach Java, for the Company had also sent along a new employee, Jeronimus Corneliszoon, a...

Nearly five million men and women have served the United States as police officers. Only one has been executed for murder.They called it Satan’s Circus–a square mile of Midtown Manhattan where vice ruled, sin flourished, and depravity danced in every doorway. At the turn of the twentieth century, murder was so common in the vice district that few people were surprised when the loudmouthed owner of a shabby casino was gunned down on the steps of its best hotel. But when, two weeks l...

A vivid narration of the history of the tulip, from its origins on the barren, windswept steppes of central Asia to its place of honor in the lush imperial gardens of Constantinople, to its starring moment as the most coveted—and beautiful—commodity in Europe.In the 1630s, visitors to the prosperous trading cities of the Netherlands couldn't help but notice that thousands of normally sober, hardworking Dutch citizens were caught up in an extraordinary frenzy of buy...

Nearly five million men and women have served the United States as police officers. Only one has been executed for murder.They called it Satan’s Circus–a square mile of Midtown Manhattan where vice ruled, sin flourished, and depravity danced in every doorway. At the turn of the twentieth century, murder was so common in the vice district that few people were surprised when the loudmouthed owner of a shabby casino was gunned down on the steps of its best hotel. But when, two weeks l...

Before the Five Families who so notoriously dominated U.S. organized crime for a bloody half-century, there was the one-fingered, surpassingly cunning Giuseppe Morello and his murderous coterie of brothers. Born into a life of poverty in rural Sicily, Morello became an American nightmare, pioneering the bizarre initiation rituals, imaginative protection rackets, influential underworld reigns, and Mafia wars later popularized by countless books, television shows, and movies.In T...

As Springfield residents decorated for Halloween in September 1972, the crime rate in the quiet, affluent township was at its lowest in years. That mood was shattered when the body of sixteen-year-old Jeannette DePalma was discovered in the local woods, allegedly surrounded by strange objects. Some feared witchcraft was to blame, while others believed a serial killer was on the loose. Rumors of a police coverup ran rampant, and the case went unsolved along with the murders of several other...

On a chilly November afternoon in 1998, a tearful thirty-six-year-old man walked into the Humboldt County Sheriff's Department in Eureka, California, and confessed to something horrible. "I hurt some people," he said. Inside his pocket was the ghastly proof of his statement. But there was more to Wayne Adam Ford than the trail of mangled victims he left behind. More, even, than the twisted predator inside, which drove him to increasingly perverse sexual appetites. Pulitzer-nominated author...

Learn about all the secrets our government has kept for the past fifty years.The US government has spent half the time covering up conspiracies as it has spent helping the American people. In Hidden History, you will see the amount of effort over the past fifty years that our government has dedicated to lying and covering up the truth to the world.Starting with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Don Jeffries chronicles a wide variety o...