Jane Stanford, the co-founder of Stanford University, died in Honolulu in 1905, shortly after surviving strychnine poisoning in San Francisco. The inquest testimony of the physicians who attended her death in Hawaii led to a coroner’s jury verdict of murder—by strychnine poisoning. Stanford University President David Starr Jordan promptly issued a press release claiming that Mrs. Stanford had died of heart disease, a claim that he supported by challenging the skills and judgment of the Honolulu physicians and toxicologist. Jordan’s diagnosis was largely accepted and promulgated in many subsequent historical accounts. In this book, the author reviews the medical reports in detail to refute Dr. Jordan’s claim and to show that Mrs. Stanford indeed died of strychnine poisoning. His research reveals that the professionals who were denounced by Dr. Jordan enjoyed honorable and distinguished careers. He concludes that Dr. Jordan went to great lengths, over a period of nearly two decades, to cover up the real circumstances of Mrs. Stanford’s death.

The rags-to-riches story of Silicon Valley's original disruptor. American Disruptor is the untold story of Leland Stanford – from his birth in a backwoods bar to the founding of the world-class university that became and remains the nucleus of Silicon Valley. The life of this robber baron, politician, and historic influencer is the astonishing tale of how one supremely ambitious man became this country's original "disruptor" – reshaping industry and engineering one of the greatest raids on the public treasury for America’s transcontinental railroad, all while living more opulently than maharajas, kings, and emperors. It is also the saga of how Stanford, once a serial failure, overcame all obstacles to become one of America’s most powerful and wealthiest men, using his high elective office to enrich himself before losing the one thing that mattered most to him—his only child and son. Scandal and intrigue would follow Stanford through his life, and even after his death, when his widow was murdered in a Honolulu hotel—a crime quickly covered up by the almost stillborn university she had saved. Richly detailed and deeply researched, American Disruptor restores Leland Stanford’s rightful place as a revolutionary force and architect of modern America.

Named One of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 by the Los Angeles Times A premier historian penetrates the fog of corruption and cover-up still surrounding the murder of a Stanford University founder to establish who did it, how, and why. In 1885 Jane and Leland Stanford cofounded a university to honor their recently deceased young son. After her husband’s death in 1893, Jane Stanford, a devoted spiritualist who expected the university to inculcate her values, steered Stanford into eccentricity and public controversy for more than a decade. In 1905 she was murdered in Hawaii, a victim, according to the Honolulu coroner’s jury, of strychnine poisoning. With her vast fortune the university’s lifeline, the Stanford president and his allies quickly sought to foreclose challenges to her bequests by constructing a story of death by natural causes. The cover-up gained traction in the murky labyrinths of power, wealth, and corruption of Gilded Age San Francisco. The murderer walked. Deftly sifting the scattered evidence and conflicting stories of suspects and witnesses, Richard White gives us the first full account of Jane Stanford’s murder and its cover-up. Against a backdrop of the city’s machine politics, rogue policing, tong wars, and heated newspaper rivalries, White’s search for the murderer draws us into Jane Stanford’s imperious household and the academic enmities of the university. Although Stanford officials claimed that no one could have wanted to murder Jane, we meet several people who had the motives and the opportunity to do so. One of these, we discover, also had the means.

A Chicago Tribune Noteworthy Book of the Year Nearly 140 years ago, in frontier California, photographer Eadweard Muybridge captured time with his camera and played it back on a flickering screen, inventing the breakthrough technology of moving pictures. Yet the visionary inventor Muybridge was also a murderer who killed coolly and meticulously, and his trial became a national sensation. Despite Muybridge’s crime, the artist’s patron, railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University, hired the photographer to answer the question of whether the four hooves of a running horse ever left the ground all at once—and together these two unlikely men launched the age of visual media. Written with style and passion by National Book Award-winner Edward Ball, this riveting true-crime tale of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads puts on display the virtues and vices of the great American West.

Poisoned palms brings the true facts of this turn of the century murder mystery into a tale of fiction.

This is a state-of-the-science book about organizational justice, which is the study of people’s perception of fairness in organizations. The volume’s contributors, all acknowledged leaders in this burgeoning field, present new theoretical positions, clarify existing paradigms, and identify future areas of application. The first chapter provides a comprehensive framework that integrates and synthesizes key concepts in the field: distributive justice, procedural justice, and retributive justice. The second chapter is a full theoretical analysis of how people use fairness judgments as means of guiding their reactions to organizations and their authorities. The subsequent two chapters examine the conceptual interrelationships between various forms of organizational justice. First, we are given a definitive review and analysis of interactional justice that critically assesses the evidence bearing on its validity. The next chapter argues that previous research has underemphasized important similarities between distributive and procedural justice, and suggests new research directions for establishing these similarities. The three following chapters focus on the social and interpersonal antecedents of justice judgments: the influence that expectations of justice and injustice can have on work-related attitudes and behavior; the construction of a model of the determinants and consequences of normative beliefs about justice in organizations that emphasizes the role of cross-cultural norms; and the potential impact of diversity and multiculturalism on the viability of organizations. The book’s final chapter identifies seven canons of organizational justice and warns that in the absence of additional conceptual refinement these canons may operate as loose cannons that threaten the existence of justice as a viable construct in the organizational sciences.

Effective Human Resource Management is the Center for Effective Organizations' (CEO) sixth report of a fifteen-year study of HR management in today's organizations. The only long-term analysis of its kind, this book compares the findings from CEO's earlier studies to new data collected in 2010. Edward E. Lawler III and John W. Boudreau measure how HR management is changing, paying particular attention to what creates a successful HR function—one that contributes to a strategic partnership and overall organizational effectiveness. Moreover, the book identifies best practices in areas such as the design of the HR organization and HR metrics. It clearly points out how the HR function can and should change to meet the future demands of a global and dynamic labor market. For the first time, the study features comparisons between U.S.-based firms and companies in China, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and other European countries. With this new analysis, organizations can measure their HR organization against a worldwide sample, assessing their positioning in the global marketplace, while creating an international standard for HR management.

A Stanford University landmark since 1941, the 285-foot-tall, Art Deco-style Hoover Tower provides a contrasting focal point for the horizontal lines of the Quad's sandstone arcades. The Quad, begun in 1887 and designed in Richardsonian Romanesque style, was only partially completed for the first class of students in 1891. One of those students was 17-year-old Herbert Hoover (1874-1964). Hoover graduated in 1895 and began his career in mining. During World War I, he shifted his energies to providing food relief in war-torn Europe. Prior to becoming US president (1929-1933), Hoover had started collecting vast documentation on international relations, global economics, war, revolution, and peace. After the presidency, he built Hoover Tower on his beloved campus to house this growing library collection. Arthur Brown Jr. (1874-1957) designed the library building, which was dedicated to promote peace in the world. Both Alexander Kerensky and later Alexander Solzhenitsyn had offices in Hoover Tower. With its growing collection of research materials, the tower is the architectural focus of a vibrant public policy center that attracts scholars and distinguished public servants such as US secretaries of state George P. Shultz and Condoleezza Rice and has hosted visiting foreign leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Hu Jintao.