“Superb. [A] first-rate narrative” (The Wall Street Journal) about the controversial construction of New York’s beloved original Penn Station and its tunnels, from the author of Eiffel's Tower and Urban Forests As bestselling books like Ron Chernow's Titan and David McCullough's The Great Bridge affirm, readers are fascinated with the grand personalities and schemes that populated New York at the close of the nineteenth century. Conquering Gotham re- creates the riveting struggle waged by the great Pennsylvania Railroad to build Penn Station and the monumental system of tunnels that would connect water-bound Manhattan to the rest of the continent by rail. Historian Jill Jonnes tells a ravishing tale of snarling plutocrats, engineering feats, and backroom politicking packed with the most colorful figures of Gilded Age New York. Conquering Gotham will be featured in an upcoming episdoe of PBS's American Experience.

Traces the epic story of the struggle to build Penn Station, describing how the nation's most powerful railroad tackled Tammany Hall corruption and the forces of nature to create a tunnel system linking Manhattan, New Jersey, and Long Island.

As the 19th cent. ends, PA Railroad pres. Alexander Cassatt seeks some way -- other than fleets of ferries from N.J. -- to bring the PRR¿s millions of passengers into water-locked Gotham. By 1901 the PRR will build a monumental system of electrified tunnels under the Hudson River, Manhattan, and the East River to Long Island, capping them with the crown jewel of PA Station. And so begins a high-stakes Gilded Age drama pitting the nation¿s greatest corp. against the forces of Tammany N.Y. This narrative brings to life the feats of politicking and engineering that forever changed N.Y.¿s physical and psychological geography. In late 1910, PA Station, Charles McKim¿s great Doric temple to transportation, opens in all its magnificence. Photos.

An illustrated account of the construction, history, and demolition of one of the most famous railroad stations in America-- New York City's Penn Station.

Packed with extraordinary photos, illustrations, and historical facts, a celebration of the legendary Manhattan rail terminal’s first century. Opened in February 1913, Grand Central Terminal—one of the country's great architectural monuments—helped create Midtown Manhattan. Over the next century, it evolved into an unofficial town square for New York. Today, it sits astride Park Avenue at 42nd Street in all its original splendor, attracting visitors by the thousands. This book celebrates Grand Central’s Centennial by tracing the Terminal’s history and design, and showcasing 200 photographs of its wonders—from the well-trodden Main Concourse to its massive power station hidden ten stories below. The stunning photographs, some archival and some taken by Frank English, official photographer of Metro-North Railroad for more than twenty-five years, capture every corner of this astonishing complex.

The gripping history of electricity and how the fateful collision of Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse left the world utterly transformed. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, three brilliant and visionary titans of America’s Gilded Age—Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse—battled bitterly as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In Empires of Light, historian Jill Jonnes portrays this extraordinary trio and their riveting and ruthless world of cutting-edge science, invention, intrigue, money, death, and hard-eyed Wall Street millionaires. At the heart of the story are Thomas Alva Edison, the nation’s most famous and folksy inventor, creator of the incandescent light bulb and mastermind of the world’s first direct current electrical light networks; the Serbian wizard of invention Nikola Tesla, elegant, highly eccentric, a dreamer who revolutionized the generation and delivery of electricity; and the charismatic George Westinghouse, Pittsburgh inventor and tough corporate entrepreneur, an industrial idealist who in the era of gaslight imagined a world powered by cheap and plentiful electricity and worked heart and soul to create it. Edison struggled to introduce his radical new direct current (DC) technology into the hurly-burly of New York City as Tesla and Westinghouse challenged his dominance with their alternating current (AC), thus setting the stage for one of the eeriest feuds in American corporate history, the War of the Electric Currents. The battlegrounds: Wall Street, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Niagara Falls, and, finally, the death chamber—Jonnes takes us on the tense walk down a prison hallway and into the sunlit room where William Kemmler, convicted ax murderer, became the first man to die in the electric chair.

"Superb. [A] first-rate narrative" (The Wall Street Journal) about the controversial construction of New York's beloved original Penn Station and its tunnels As bestselling books like Ron Chernow's Titan and David McCullough's The Great Bridge affirm, readers are fascinated with the grand personalities and schemes that populated New York at the close of the nineteenth century. Conquering Gotham re- creates the riveting struggle waged by the great Pennsylvania Railroad to build Penn Station and the monumental system of tunnels that would connect water-bound Manhattan to the rest of the continent by rail. Historian Jill Jonnes tells a ravishing tale of snarling plutocrats, engineering feats, and backroom politicking packed with the most colorful figures of Gilded Age New York. Conquering Gotham will be featured in an upcoming episdoe of PBS's American Experience

From the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence? To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber—one of our most important and provocative thinkers—traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today, and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice…though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing—even romantic—about bureaucracy. Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible. An essential book for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us—and the better, freer world we should, perhaps, begin to imagine for ourselves.

Make history come alive! This book helps librarians and teachers as well as readers themselves find books they will enjoy—titles that will animate and explain the past, entertain, and expand their minds. This invaluable resource offers reading lists of contemporary and classic non-fiction history books and historical fiction, covering all time periods throughout the world, and including practically all manner of human endeavors. Every book included is hand-selected as an entertaining and enlightening read! Organized by appeal characteristics, this book will help readers zero in on the history books they will like best—for instance, titles that emphasize character, tell a specific type of historical story, convey a mood, or are presented in a particular setting. Every book listed has been recommended based on the author's research, and has proved to be a satisfying and worthwhile read.

In this utterly immersive volume, Mike Wallace captures the swings of prosperity and downturn, from the 1898 skyscraper-driven boom to the Bankers' Panic of 1907, the labor upheaval, and violent repression during and after the First World War. Here is New York on a whole new scale, moving from national to global prominence -- an urban dynamo driven by restless ambition, boundless energy, immigrant dreams, and Wall Street greed. Within the first two decades of the twentieth century, a newly consolidated New York grew exponentially. The city exploded into the air, with skyscrapers jostling for prominence, and dove deep into the bedrock where massive underground networks of subways, water pipes, and electrical conduits sprawled beneath the city to serve a surging population of New Yorkers from all walks of life. New York was transformed in these two decades as the world's second-largest city and now its financial capital, thriving and sustained by the city's seemingly unlimited potential. Wallace's new book matches its predecessor in pure page-turning appeal and takes America's greatest city to new heights.