Rudolf Friml (1879-1972) is best known as the composer of romantic 1920s operettas. Beginning in 1912 he wrote music in different styles for Broadway, and in 1914, along with Irving Berlin and Victor Herbert, he became a charter member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). Skilled at evoking far-away times and ......
Standing alongside J. P. Morgan, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, Charles Tyson Yerkes (1837-1905) was one of the most influential and controversial public figures in America. Robber Baron is the first biography of the traction magnate who was behind the Chicago Loop Elevated, an investor in the London Underground, namesake of the University of ......
A Black Entrepreneur in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco
Mary Ellen Pleasant arrived in Gold Rush-era San Francisco a free black woman with abolitionist convictions and a predilection for entrepreneurial success. Behind the convenient and trusted disguise of ''Mammy,'' she transformed domestic labor into enterprise, amassed remarkable real estate, wealth, and power, and gained notoriety for her work in ......
Mary Elizabeth Garrett was one of the most influential philanthropists and women activists of the Gilded Age. With Mary's legacy all but forgotten, Kathleen Waters Sander recounts in impressive detail the life and times of this remarkable woman, through the turbulent years of the Civil War to the early twentieth century. At once a captivating ......
As Louise Brown - the first baby conceived by in vitro fertilization - celebrates her 30th birthday in 2008, Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner tell the fascinating story of the man who first showed that human in vitro fertilization was possible. John Rock spent his career studying human reproduction. The first researcher to fertilize a human egg in ......
A beautifully told and unique recollection of life as the child of immigrant Jews in the Bronx and as the child of deaf parents.Lennard J. Davis grew up as the hearing child of deaf parents. In this candid, affecting, and often funny memoir, he recalls the joys and confusions of this special world, especially his complex and sometimes difficult ......
This major biography of Shelley, England's most radical and controversial Romantic poet, is the first to appear in thirty years. Informed by the author's extensive research, psychological insight, and recent scholarship on Shelley and his circle, the biography stresses the intimate relationship between the poet's writing and his complex ......
In addition to his novels, short stories, plays, poetry, and a flood of journalism, Theodore Dreiser is estimated to have written an astonishing 20,000 letters. A Picture and a Criticism of Life presents a selection from his previously unpublished letters and shows Dreiser in every mood and circumstance, from crisply professional to happily ......
In Bound for America, Nicholas Temperley documents the lives, careers, and music of three British composers who emigrated from England in mid-career and became leaders in the musical life of Federal-era America. William Selby of London and Boston (1738-98), Rayner Taylor of London and Philadelphia (1745-1825), and George K. Jackson of London, New ......
