Among the fabled tycoons of the Gilded Age—Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt—is a forgotten figure: Mrs. Frank Leslie. For 20 years she ran the country’s largest publishing company, Frank Leslie Publishing, which chronicled postbellum America in…
Marion Graves Anthon Fish, known by the nicknames “Mamie” and “The Fun-Maker,” threw the most epic parties in American history. This Gilded Age icon brought it all: lavish decor; A-list invitees; booze; pranks; and large animal guest stars. If you…
Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the nineteenth century with a twenty-first-century battle over a $300 million inheritance. At its heart is a reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark, a woman…
Documents the story of the Gilded Age mansion Biltmore, tracing George Vanderbilt's construction of his spectacular European-style estate with the help of two famed architects and the efforts of his bride, Edith Stuyvesant Dresser, to become its…
The granddaughter of the richest man in America, Consuelo Vanderbilt was the prize catch of New York Society. But her socially ambitious mother, Alva, was adamant that her daughter should make a grand marriage, and the underfunded Duke of…
Traces the public and private lives of cousins William Waldorf Astor and John Jacob Astor IV, nineteenth-century heirs and rivals who pursued separate ambitions, built the original Waldorf-Astoria hotel, and influenced social behavior before John…
A grisly murder on June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era’s most perplexing murder mystery. Seized upon by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the case became a publicity circus, as their rival…
A vivid social history that brings to light the 'girl stunt reporters' of the Gilded Age who went undercover to expose corruption and abuse in America, and redefined what it meant to be a woman and a journalist'pioneers whose influence continues to…
Stanford White was a louche man-about-town and a canny cultural entrepreneur—the creator of landmark buildings that elevated American architecture to new heights. Augustus Saint-Gaudens was the son of an immigrant shoemaker, a moody introvert, and a…
Set against the backdrop of New York's Gilded Age, with its extremes of plutocratic wealth, tenement poverty, and rising social unrest, Rogues' Gallery is a fascinating story of the origins of modern policing and organized crime in an eventful era…
The Edge of Anarchy by Jack Kelly offers a vivid account of the greatest uprising of working people in American history. At the pinnacle of the Gilded Age, a boycott of Pullman sleeping cars by hundreds of thousands of railroad employees brought…
