The only biography of the pioneering investigative journalist Ida M. Tarbell for YA readers, lavishly illustrated with archival photographs and prints.

In this first definitive biography of Ida Tarbell, Kathleen Brady, who is on the staff of Time, has written a readable and widely acclaimed book about one of America's great journalists.Ida Tarbell's generation called her "a muckraker" (the term was Theodore Roosevelt's, and he didn't intend it as a compliment), but in our time she would have been known as "an investigative reporter," with the celebrity of Woodward and Bernstein. By any description, Ida Tarbell was one of the most powerful women of her time in the United States: admired, feared, hated. When her History of the Standard Oil Company was published, first in McClure's Magazine and then as a book (1904), it shook the Rockefeller interests, caused national outrage, and led the Supreme Court to fragment the giant monopoly.A journalist of extraordinary intelligence, accuracy, and courage, she was also the author of the influential and popular books on Napoleon and Abraham Lincoln, and her hundreds of articles dealt with public figures such as Louis Pateur and Emile Zola, and contemporary issues such as tariff policy and labor. During her long life, she knew Teddy Roosevelt, Jane Addams, Henry James, Samuel McClure, Lincoln Stephens, Herbert Hoover, and many other prominent Americans. She achieved more than almost any woman of her generation, but she was an antisuffragist, believing that the traditional roles of wife and mother were more important than public life. She ultimately defended the business interests she had once attacked.To this day, her opposition to women's rights disturbs some feminists. Kathleen Brady writes of her: "[She did not have] the flinty stuff of which the cutting edge of any revolution is made. . . . Yet she was called to achievement in a day when women were called only to exist. Her triumph was that she succeeded. Her tragedy ws that she was never to know it."

Song for My Fathers is the story of a young white boy driven by a consuming passion to learn the music and ways of a group of aging black jazzmen in the twilight years of the segregation era. Contemporaries of Louis Armstrong, most of them had played in local obscurity until Preservation Hall launched a nationwide revival of interest in traditional jazz. They called themselves “the mens.” And they welcomed the young apprentice into their ranks. The boy was introduced into this remarkable fellowship by his father, an eccentric Southern liberal and failed novelist whose powerful articles on race had made him one of the most effective polemicists of the early Civil Rights movement. Nurtured on his father’s belief in racial equality, the aspiring clarinetist embraced the old musicians with a boundless love and admiration. The narrative unfolds against the vivid backdrop of New Orleans in the 1950s and ‘60s. But that magical place is more than decor; it is perhaps the central player, for this story could not have taken place in any other city in the world.

An architect who excelled at transforming an architectural fantasy into a practical, livable home, Addison Mizner was one of the most original and influential designers America has produced. The houses, clubs, and shops he built for the wealthy of Palm Beach and Boca Raton, Florida, evince a brilliant grasp of how to blend a building with the environment, how to adapt it to the climate and how to situate it in order to make the best use of the elements of sea, light, and air. This lavishly illustrated volume recaptures the genius of Addison Mizner. It contains over 180 photographs — both interiors and exteriors — depicting more than 30 residences, including Mizner's own, plus those of Harold Vanderbilt, Rudman Wanamaker, A. J. Drexel Biddle, Jr., Edward Shearson, Mrs. Hugh Dillman, and many more. Also covered are such landmark Mizner creations as the Everglades Club, Via Parigi, the Singer Building, The Cloister at Boca Raton, the Riverside Baptist Church at Jacksonville, and many others. A superb appreciation by author and journalist Ida M. Tarbell offers fascinating glimpses into Mizner's early life and background, and how it prepared him to develop architecture that "belonged" in the Florida landscape. Inspired by the beauty and charm of the villas and palaces of the Mediterranean, Mizner designed in a Spanish Colonial style far better suited to the subtropical sun and climate of Florida than the transplanted houses of the North at first so common in the state. A new Introduction by Mizner scholar Donald W. Curl offers an additional appreciation of the architect and his innovative and imaginative conceptions, which continue to win new admirers among connoisseurs of classic design. Reproduced from a rare edition much sought after by collectors, this inexpensive volume will be welcomed by architects, students and historians of architecture — and anyone interested in the life and achievements of Addison Mizner.

A fascinating history of the rise and fall of influential Gilded Age magazine McClure’s and the two unlikely outsiders at its helm—as well as a timely, full-throated defense of investigative journalism in America The president of the United States made headlines around the world when he publicly attacked the press, denouncing reporters who threatened his reputation as “muckrakers” and “forces for evil.” The year was 1906, the president was Theodore Roosevelt—and the publication that provoked his fury was McClure’s magazine. One of the most influential magazines in American history, McClure’s drew over 400,000 readers and published the groundbreaking stories that defined the Gilded Age, including the investigation of Standard Oil that toppled the Rockefeller monopoly. Driving this revolutionary publication were two improbable newcomers united by single-minded ambition. S. S. McClure was an Irish immigrant, who, despite bouts of mania, overthrew his impoverished upbringing and bent the New York media world to his will. His steadying hand and star reporter was Ida Tarbell, a woman who defied gender expectations and became a notoriously fearless journalist. The scrappy, bold McClure's group—Tarbell, McClure, and their reporters Ray Stannard Baker and Lincoln Steffens—cemented investigative journalism’s crucial role in democracy. From reporting on labor unrest and lynching, to their exposés of municipal corruption, their reporting brought their readers face to face with a nation mired in dysfunction. They also introduced Americans to the voices of Willa Cather, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, and many others. Tracing McClure’s from its meteoric rise to its spectacularly swift and dramatic combustion, Citizen Reporters is a thrillingly told, deeply researched biography of a powerhouse magazine that forever changed American life. It’s also a timely case study that demonstrates the crucial importance of journalists who are unafraid to speak truth to power.

Twentieth-century investigative journalism finds its roots in the work of Ida M. Tarbell (1857-1944). Interested in the sciences, Tarbell brought the rigor of scientific inquiry and a penchant for accuracy to detailed investigations of larger topics, especially those involving governmental corruption and the excesses of big business. And, although Tarbell is best known for her muckraking journalistic battles with John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil and the fight for antitrust legislation, she was also a thorough biographer, a social commentator and speaker, and a women's rights advocate - of sorts - during a time when most women did not work (or write) outside the home. Despite all of Tarbell's accomplishments, there has been little analysis, and no compilation, of her writings. Robert C. Kochersberger has painstakingly gathered the best of her scattered articles, book chapters, speeches, and previously unpublished pieces into a single volume so that her writings may be reexamined in the light of recent scholarship in the fields of journalism, women's and gender studies, sociology, and American history. The resulting analysis reveals Tarbell to have been much more than just a muckraker, as Teddy Roosevelt once labeled her. In fact, Kochersberger's presentation of Tarbell's fifty-year writing career holds her as an exemplary journalist whose passion, conviction, and nonfiction reporting of business and social topics demonstrate how the best journalists should use and communicate facts and impressions to the reading public.