Lighthouses were built on the Hudson River in New York between 1826 to 1921 to help guide freight and passenger traffic. One of the most famous was the iconic Statue of Liberty. This fascinating history with photos will bring the time of traffic along the river alive. Set against the backdrop of purple mountains, lush hillsides, and tidal wetlands, the lighthouses of the Hudson River were built between 1826 and 1921 to improve navigational safety on a river teeming with freight and passenger traffic. Unlike the towering beacons of the seacoasts, these river lighthouses were architecturally diverse, ranging from short conical towers to elaborate Victorian houses. Operated by men and women who at times risked and lost their lives in service of safe navigation, these beacons have overseen more than a century of extraordinary technological and social change. Of the dozens of historic lighthouses and beacons that once dotted the Hudson River, just eight remain, including the iconic Statue of Liberty, New York Harbor's great monument to freedom and immigration, which served as an official lighthouse between 1886 and 1902. Hudson River Lighthouses invites readers to explore these unique icons and their fascinating stories.

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Lighthouse Service, and Great American Lighthouses is a bicentennial salute to the

Grant Under Fire comprehensively dissects the military career of Ulysses S. Grant. Rigorously based on a wealth of primary sources--many not cited before--the book resolves scores of controversies, such as his drunken partying with the enemy on flag-of-truce boats out of Cairo, dishonestly blaming Lew Wallace for the march to Shiloh, pretending that he had the ultimate plan to pass Vicksburg all along, stealing the credit for the charge up Missionary Ridge, and leaving wounded men to suffer and die between the lines at Cold Harbor.Despite his sterling reputation as an officer and a gentleman, he suffered the biggest surprise of the American Civil War, committed the worst official act of anti-Semitism on this nation's soil, and came closest of all Union generals to losing Washington. Defenders rank his generalship above Robert E. Lee's, but to do so, they must ignore his simplistic, aggressive strategies that led to a war of attrition and the amateurish tactics of impetuous, frontal assaults, all along the line and against fortified positions.Grant Under Fire overturns the familiar renditions by detailing Grant's corruption at Cairo, his occupation of Paducah under orders, his incapacity in the Mississippi Delta, and the army's non-triumphal exit from the Wilderness, as well as debunking a host of other oft-told tales and myths.

"Rare in any age is work which incorporates a passion for experience, a commitment to truth, an ability to plumb the irrational, and a fluency in poetic language and music which can work through all these tangled thickets, but Eve Alexandra does just that. . . . This is true poetry; it immediately takes its place as a participant in the vast historical voice which composes poetry, a voice which contains ten-thousand tones, but which takes nothing unto itself which doesn't resonate, as do the poems of The Drowned Girl, with authenticity and fervor."--C. K. Williams, Judge "One of the things I find compelling about Eve Alexandra's poems is that, while the narrator is seductive and beautiful, she is not pleasing. She does not offer comfort. She is not kind or solicitous. Like Ariel, who 'performs the tempest' for Prospero, Alexandra, too, is a tempest-ress: these are the storms and drownings of her own invention. Like Ariel's bedeviling and gorgeous tunes composed to tease the sorrowful, these are poems of the taunt and tease, the razor in the apple."--Lynn Emanuel "Something bright and reflective, something lucid and exacting glints at the center of this fleshy, original debut. Is it a needle? Is it a scalpel? Is it a scythe? Is it the switchblade a woman might carry in her purse? Eve Alexandra wields a tender, sharp honesty. The lines cut and dice, arc and glimmer in the light of her lyricism and intelligence. These poems will open you, make you bleed, make you wonder."--Terrance Hayes