This criminal history of the Berkshires is brimming with unforgettable stories of greed, jealousy, and madness from the turn of the twentieth century. The Berkshires of Western Massachusetts are known for their picturesque beauty, but this history offers a fascinating look at the region’s dark side. This chronicle includes true tales of greed, betrayal and violence in The Bay State. In the summer of 1893, a tall and well-dressed burglar plundered the massive summer mansions of the upper crust . . . A visit from President Teddy Roosevelt in 1902 ended in tragedy when a trolley car smashed into the presidential carriage, killing a Secret Service agent . . . A psychotic millworker opened fire on a packed streetcar, leaving three dead and five wounded, shocking the nation . . . These and many more stories—from axe murders to botched bank jobs—paint a stark portrait of the inequities that shadowed the extravagance of the Gilded Age.

"Mr. Amelinckx is an adroit storyteller and thorough researcher, and in Satellite Boy he has written a good, engrossing yarn." —The Wall Street Journal Spanning the underworld haunts of Montreal to Havana and Miami in the early days of the Cold War, Satellite Boy reveals the unlikely connection between an audacious bank heist and the “other Space Race” that gave birth to the modern communication age On April 6, 1965, Georges Lemay was relaxing on his yacht in a south Florida marina following one of the largest and most daring bank heists in Canadian history. For four years, the roguishly handsome criminal mastermind hid in plain sight, eluding capture and the combined efforts of the FBI, Interpol, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. His future appeared secure. What Lemay didn’t know was that less than two hundred miles away at Cape Canaveral, a brilliant engineer named Harold Rosen was about to usher in the age of global live television with the launch of the world’s first twenty-four-hour commercial communications satellite. Rosen’s extraordinary accomplishment would not only derail Lemay’s cushy life but change the world forever. Brimming with criminal panache and technological intrigue, and set against a turbulent and iconic period that includes the moon landing and the civil rights movement, Satellite Boy tells the largely forgotten, high-stakes story of the two equally driven men who inadvertently launched the modern era.

"Before it became a haven for arts and culture, the Berkshires was a rugged, sparsely populated frontier. From the early days of Revolutionary fervor and industrial enterprise to today's tourism, many chilling stories remain. A lost girl haunts a cemetery in Washington, and mysterious spirits still perform at Tanglewood. From the ghostly halls of the Houghton Mansion to the eerie events at the Hoosac Tunnel, residents and visitors alike have felt fear and awe in these hills, telling tales of shadow figures, disembodied voices and spectral trains. Author Robert Oakes, who has given ghost tours at The Mount in Lenox for more than a decade, leads this spirited journey through history."--Page 4 of cover.

A wry, swashbuckling tale of greed and deceit that traverses the excitement—and fury—​of the 18th-century's golden age of piracy. An injured French officer struggles along a desolate stretch of West African coastline, desperate to hold on to a secret. His tale soon ends—violently—but a young pirate recruit, Patrick Devlin, leaves that same beach unscathed, with a new pair of boots and a treasure map in his possession. Now, the adventures of the pirate Devlin, his shipmates, and those who wish them all dead move forward without restraint, through broadside barrages and subterfuge and brutal encounters on land and at sea, where nothing is as it seems. In these pages, readers will meet Blackbeard and his cohorts, Portuguese colonial governors and French commandants, officials of the East India Company and Royal Naval officers, fresh-faced midshipmen and gnarly, scarred, and drunken pirate crewmen. But none is as impressive and memorable as the former servant and newly minted pirate Captain Devlin—unless it's the one man he once served on board a British man-of-war, a man now sworn to kill him.

Visit the long ago crime and dire deeds in the Hudson Valley of New York. The Hudson Valley is drenched in history, culture and blood. In the fall of 1893, Lizzie Halliday left a trail of bodies in her wake, slaughtering two strangers and her husband before stabbing a nurse to death at the asylum housing her. A Jazz Age politician, tired of fighting with his overbearing wife, murdered her and buried the body under the front porch. In 1882, a cantankerous old miner, dubbed the Austerlitz Cannibal by the press, chopped up his partner before he himself swung from the end of a rope. Author Andrew Amelinckx dredges up the Hudson Valley's dark past, from Prohibition-era shootouts to unsolved murders, in eleven heart-pounding true stories.

The fascinating story of Boston's violent past is told for the first time in this history of the city's riots, from the food shortage uprisings in the 18th century to the anti-busing riots of the 20th century.

Shots rang out in a prominent Pittsfield family home on the morning of August 20, 1900, ending the life of young socialite May Fosburgh. Who pulled the trigger was unclear, and the scandal captivated attention well beyond the Berkshires. Her brother was a top suspect, but the distraught family claimed an intruder was to blame. Investigators, media and the public struggled to make sense of conflicting details, including suspicious gunpowder residue, as the mystery remained unsolved. Author Frank J. Leskovitz unravels the tale that still lingers in the hills generations later.

From praising dictators to alienating allies, Trump made chaos his calling card. But four years into his administration, had his strategy caused more problems than it solved? Richard Nixon tried it first. Hoping to make communist bloc countries uneasy and thus unstable, Nixon let them think he was just crazy enough to nuke them. He called this “the madman theory.” Nearly half a century later, President Trump employed his own “madman theory,” sometimes intentionally and sometimes not. Trump praised Kim Jong-un and their “love notes,” admired and flattered Vladimir Putin, and gave a greenlight to Recep Tayyip Erdogan to invade Syria. Meanwhile, he attacked US institutions and officials, ignored his own advisors, and turned his back on US allies from Canada and Mexico to NATO to Ukraine to the Kurds at war with ISIS. Trump was willing to make the nation’s most sensitive and consequential decisions while often ignoring the best information and intelligence available to him. He continually caught the world off guard, but did it work? In The Madman Theory, Jim Sciutto showed how Trump's supporters assumed he had a strategy for long-term success – that he somehow played three-dimensional chess. Four years into Trump's presidency, it was clear his unpredictable focus on short-term headlines did in fact lead to predictably mediocre results in the short and long run. Trump’s foreign policy undermined American values and national security interests, while hurting allies who had been on our side for decades, leaving them isolated and vulnerable without American support. Meanwhile, Trump had comforted and emboldened our enemies. The White House’s revolving door of staff demonstrated that Trump had no real plan; all serious policymakers—and those who would be a check on his most destructive impulses—were exiled or jumped ship. Sciutto interviewed a wide swath of then-current and former administration officials to assemble the first comprehensive portrait of the impact of Trump’s erratic foreign policy. Smart, authoritative, and compelling, The Madman Theory is the definitive take on Trump’s calamitous legacy around the globe, showing how his proclivity for chaos was creating a world which was more unstable, violent, and impoverished than it had been before.

Can justice be forced on individuals and communities? The essays in this collection by Henry David Thoreau urge us to consider the difficult matter of how to counter the specific injustice manifested in the practice of buying and selling human beings and how to implement laws and practices that help establish justice. Of the many philosophical ideas Thoreau explores, the central concern is how to end slavery and provide justice for all. It is no surprise to find Thoreau defending the idea of civil disobedience, but his defense of John Brown, who used violence, including murder, commands our attention. The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s in the U.S. was heavily influenced by the rhetoric, the actions, and the overall philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., who famously combined civil disobedience and nonviolent action under the strong influence of Mohandas K. Gandhi. Although Gandhi staunchly defends and promotes the use of nonviolence, he is quick to condemn inaction as an even greater evil than violence. If forced to choose between doing nothing and using violence, he would choose violence; but his many writings and speeches are designed to show that we almost always have a nonviolent alternative to oppose injustice and foster justice. The lives of more than a billion residents of India have been profoundly shaped by the ideas Gandhi presents and defends in these selections from MY NONVIOLENCE. The liberation of India from British colonialism and the establishing of what Gandhi called "home rule" is powerful evidence of the role nonviolence can play in bringing about justice and eliminating injustice. Gandhi addresses not only matters of race and skin color but also the caste system and the social stratification that currently pervade the entire globe. These works by Thoreau and Gandhi consider the best way to promote justice and goodness not in utopia but in the actual world where we live. The primary goal of Agora Publications is not to answer such controversial questions by taking sides but to provide access to philosophical works that promote such dialogue. Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 - May 6, 1862) was an American philosopher who wrote about nature, social and political issues, and human existence in general. He worked closely with other transcendentalist thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller. Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings; his essay "Civil Disobedience" offers arguments for disobedience to an unjust state. Mohandas K. Gandhi (October 2, 1869 - January 30, 1948) was an Indian philosopher who was formally educated as a lawyer. He initially taught and practiced nonviolent resistance in South Africa and then led the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule. His actions and his writings inspired movements for civil rights and freedom throughout the globe.