NATIONAL BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD In this groundbreaking biography, T.J. Stiles tells the dramatic story of Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, the combative man and American icon who, through his genius and force of will, did more than perhaps any other individual to create modern capitalism. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, The First Tycoon describes an improbable life, from Vanderbilt’s humble birth during the presidency of George Washington to his death as one of the richest men in American history. In between we see how the Commodore helped to launch the transportation revolution, propel the Gold Rush, reshape Manhattan, and invent the modern corporation. Epic in its scope and success, the life of Vanderbilt is also the story of the rise of America itself.

How a Michigan farm boy became the richest man in America is a classic, almost mythic tale, but never before has Henry Ford’s outsized genius been brought to life so vividly as it is in this engaging and superbly researched biography. The real Henry Ford was a tangle of contradictions. He set off the consumer revolution by producing a car affordable to the masses, all the while lamenting the moral toll exacted by consumerism. He believed in giving his workers a living wage, though he was entirely opposed to union labor. He had a warm and loving relationship with his wife, but sired a son with another woman. A rabid anti-Semite, he nonetheless embraced African American workers in the era of Jim Crow. Uncovering the man behind the myth, situating his achievements and their attendant controversies firmly within the context of early twentieth-century America, Watts has given us a comprehensive, illuminating, and fascinating biography of one of America’s first mass-culture celebrities.

At sixteen, Jesse James began his fighting career by killing Unionist neighbours on their doorsteps. In the bloodshed and bitterness that followed the South's surrender at Appomattox, Jesse and his fellow guerillas, with their gunfights and hold-ups, became part of the intensely brutal struggle by the White South against the racial egalitarianism and Federal power fostered by Reconstruction. In the first serious biography of Jesse James in forty years, T. J. Stiles paints a strikingly new and vivid portrait of the period before the American Civil War, during the conflict and its aftermath. With groundbreaking scholarship and dazzling reinterpretation, T. J. Stiles has refashioned one of the great legends of American history.

Written by a master storyteller, Tycoon's War is the remarkable account of an epic imperialist duel—a violent battle of the capitalist versus the idealist, money versus ambition, and a monumental clash of egos that resulted in the deaths of thousands of Americans. This incredible true story—impeccably researched and never before told in full—is packed with greed, intrigue, and some of the most hair-raising battle scenes ever written.

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.

Armed with a trove of previously unreleased archives, Edward J. Renehan Jr. offers a compelling portrait of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who built large shipping and rail enterprises into cornerstones of the American economy, and amassed one of the greatest fortunes the world has ever known. This is the definitive biography of a man whose influence on American business was unsurpassed in his day -- or any other.

Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History In this magisterial biography, T. J. Stiles paints a portrait of Custer both deeply personal and sweeping in scope, proving how much of Custer’s legacy has been ignored. He demolishes Custer’s historical caricature, revealing a capable yet insecure man, intelligent yet bigoted, passionate yet self-destructive, a romantic individualist at odds with the institution of the military (court-martialed twice in six years) and the new corporate economy, a wartime emancipator who rejected racial equality. Stiles argues that, although Custer was justly noted for his exploits on the western frontier, he also played a central role as both a wide-ranging participant and polarizing public figure in his extraordinary, transformational time—a time of civil war, emancipation, brutality toward Native Americans, and, finally, the Industrial Revolution—even as he became one of its casualties. Intimate, dramatic, and provocative, this biography captures the larger story of the changing nation. It casts surprising new light on one of the best-known figures of American history, a subject of seemingly endless fascination.

The First Black Tycoon chronicles the life of Tyronius, a 19 year old Georgia slave, from 1858 to 1868, who makes an unplanned but necessary escape to save his life. Due to the unstable conditions in the South, including the advent of civil war, he is forced to hide out in plain sight in a neighboring state. This heartwarming and sometimes humorous story, while a cknowledging the realities of slavery, emphasizes the value of kindness, ingenuity and family loyalty which ultimately leads Tyronius to success, freedom and fortune. This novel, while entirely fictional, does include a few historically accurate landmarks and characters in situations which could have actually occurred.

William Butler Ogden was a pioneer railroad magnate, one of the earliest founders and developers of the city of Chicago, and an important influence on U.S. westward expansion. His career as a businessman stretched from the streets of Chicago to the wilds of the Wisconsin lumber forests, from the iron mines of Pennsylvania to the financial capitals in New York and beyond. Jack Harpster’s The Railroad Tycoon Who Built Chicago: A Biography of William B. Ogden is the first chronicle of one of the most notable figures in nineteenth-century America. Harpster traces the life of Ogden from his early experiences as a boy and young businessman in upstate New York to his migration to Chicago, where he invested in land, canal construction, and steamboat companies. He became Chicago’s first mayor, built the city’s first railway system, and suffered through the Great Chicago Fire. His diverse business interests included real estate, land development, city planning, urban transportation, manufacturing, beer brewing, mining, and banking, to name a few. Harpster, however, does not simply focus on Ogden’s role as business mogul; he delves into the heart and soul of the man himself. The Railroad Tycoon Who Built Chicago is a meticulously researched and nuanced biography set against the backdrop of the historical and societal themes of the nineteenth century. It is a sweeping story about one man’s impact on the birth of commerce in America. Ogden’s private life proves to be as varied and interesting as his public persona, and Harpster weaves the two into a colorful tapestry of a life well and usefully lived.

The history of human waste. How I learned to love the excrement; The early history of human excreta; Treasure nigh soil as if it were gold!; The water closet dilemma and the sewage farm paradigm; Germs, fertilizer, and the poop police -- The present: a sludge revolution in progress. The great sewage time bomb and the redistribution of nutrients on the planet; Loowatt, a loo that turns waste into watts; The crap that cooks your dinner and container-based sanitation; HomeBiogas : your personal digester in a box; Made in New York; Lystek, the home of sewage smoothies; How DC water makes biosolids BLOOM; From biosolids to biofuels -- The future of medicine and other things; Poop : the best (and cheapest medicine; Looking where the sun doesn't shine; From the kindness of one's gut : an insider look into stool banks -- Afterword : breathing poetry into poop.