Download or read book A Debonair Scoundrel written by Lately Thomas and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1962, this book tells the flamboyant story of Abe Ruef and San Francisco’s infamous era of graft. In the year 1906, San Francisco was rocked by two calamitous earthquakes. Nature herself was responsible for one; a man named Ruef was responsible for the other. Abraham Ruef (1864-1936), known as Abe Ruef, was a rogue of innumerable refinements. A classical scholar, a wit, a bon vivant, he was also a political boss who not only picked the city’s officials—among them, “Handsome Gene” Schmitz, San Francisco’s “bassoon mayor”—but picked the city’s pockets as well. When he was finally arraigned for graft, Ruef attempted to appoint himself District Attorney to prosecute the case! In A Debonair Scoundrel, Lately Thomas reconstructs the little known but fantastic career and its gaudy, dramatic setting: a city thrown into wild disorder; fighting in the courts reeking with corruption; kidnappings, and flying bullets with overtones of slapstick comedy and suspense. The men who saw to Ruef’s undoing were relics of a bygone West: millionaire Rudolph Spreckels, who tried to reform his own class; Fremont Older, the Evening Bulletin crusading editor—and others, such as Teddy Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst. Their encounter with Abe Ruef is wittily described by Lately Thomas, author of The Vanishing Evangelist, who has brought his magnificently creative gifts to a book as brilliant and rambunctious as the fabulous era he describes.
Download or read book Audacious Scoundrels written by Steven L. Piott and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-05-01 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century a growing number of ordinary citizens had the feeling that all was not as it should be. Men who were making money made prodigious amounts, but this new wealth somehow passed over the heads of the common people. As this new breed of journalists began to examine their subjects with scrutiny, they soon discovered that those individuals were essentially “simple men of extraordinary boldness.” And it was easy to understand how they were able to accomplish their sinister purposes: “at first abruptly and bluntly, by asking and giving no quarter, and later with the same old determination and ruthlessness but with educated satellites who were glad to explain and idealize their behavior.”[i] “Nothing is lost save honor,” said one infamous buccaneer, and that was an attitude that governed the amoral principles and extralegal actions of many audacious scoundrels. Relying on secondary sources, magazine and newspaper articles, and personal accounts from those involved, this volume captures some of the sensational true stories that took place in the western United States during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. The theme that runs through each of the stories is the general contempt for the law that seemed to pervade the culture at the time and the consuming desire to acquire wealth at any cost—what Geoffrey C. Ward has called “the disposition to be rich.” End Notes Introduction [i]Louis Filler, Crusaders for American Liberalism (Yellow Springs, OH: Antioch Press, 1964), 14.
Download or read book Cosmopolitans written by Fred Rosenbaum and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Levi Strauss, A.L. Gump, Yehudi Menuhin, Gertrude Stein, Adolph Sutro, Congresswoman Florence Prag Kahn--Jewish people have been so enmeshed in life in and around San Francisco that their story is a chronicle of the metropolis itself. Since the Gold Rush, Bay Area Jews have countered stereotypes, working as farmers and miners, boxers and mountaineers. They were Gold Rush pioneers, Gilded Age tycoons, and Progressive Era reformers. Told through an astonishing range of characters and events, Cosmopolitans illuminates many aspects of Jewish life in the area: the high profile of Jewish women, extraordinary achievements in the business world, the cultural creativity of the second generation, the bitter debate about the proper response to the Holocaust and Zionism, and much more. Focusing in rich detail on the first hundred years after the Gold Rush, the book also takes the story up to the present day, demonstrating how unusually strong affinities for the arts and for the struggle for social justice have characterized this community even as it has changed over time. Cosmopolitans, set in the uncommonly diverse Bay Area, is a truly unique chapter of the Jewish experience in America.
Download or read book With Their Own Blood written by Virginia Roberts and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-31 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: His wife dead, Elisa Green Pennington gathered up his brood of twelve young children in 1857 and left Texas for California, the promised land. The Penningtons could not have imagined what the untamed frontier had in store for them. After a difficult trek across West Texas and New Mexico, they were forced by sicknesses and circumstances to settle in the newly claimed Gadsden Purchase - present-day southern Arizona - where members of the clan and their descendants would remain into Arizona's statehood years. At the heart of this saga is Larcena Pennington Page Scott, who is witness as her loved ones are killed and her family's livelihood and property stolen. Larcena lived well into the twentieth century to tell the story of her captivity by Apaches and her miraculous escape from the captors, of outlawry and murder along the Mexican border, of disease, hunger, and isolation, and of the unceasing depredations by hostile Apaches during the 1860s and '70s. Using family letters, papers, and primary documents from all over the Southwest, Virginia Culin Roberts traces the lives of Larcena and her family. Roberts presents a real-life story of the rigors of surviving in a hostile and unforgiving land, transcending family history to provide a framework for telling the tale of the western frontier in the bloody Civil War and antebellum years.
Download or read book The Parameters of Urban Fiscal Policy written by Terrence J. McDonald and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.
Download or read book The Scoundrel s New Con written by Catherine Stein and published by Catherine Stein, LLC. This book was released on 2021-05-26 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "refreshingly original and incandescently clever" - Publishers Weekly (starred review) He’s pulling the con of a lifetime. Unless she exposes the naked truth. Conman Jack Weaver has his eyes on the prize. The arrogant Earl of Bardrick has offered five thousand pounds to anyone who can prove his castle is haunted. With money like that, Jack can ensure he’ll never end up on the streets or in prison again. And his spirit photography skills are just the trick needed to convince all of the earl’s houseguests to believe in something unseen. Investigative journalist Tess Cochran believes in one thing: the truth. She’s not going to let phony ghosts and trick photographs swindle anyone, even a snobbish aristocrat like Bardrick. And she’s certainly not going to let herself be swayed by Jack Weaver’s charming smile and mischievous antics. When Jack and Tess stumble upon one of the castle’s many secrets, they realize something nefarious lurks behind the earl’s competition. To solve the mystery, these rivals forge a reluctant partnership. As they strip down the facts, Jack and Tess begin to find that the deepest truths may be concealed in their hearts.
Download or read book Lord Johnnie written by Leslie Turner and published by Rare Treasure Editions. This book was released on 2021-11-09T16:47:00Z with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Men will like and women will love dashing, rip-roaring Lord Johnnie, left-handed scion of nobility. Strange mixture of London's Whitehall where the nobles lived and Whitefriars where the thieves and pickpockets dwelt, Johnnie the Rogue was at home in both. Leader of London's underworld, Johnnie barely escapes hanging, but not before he has met the lovely Lady Leanna Somerset. His headlong adventures take Lord Johnnie out to sea as a pirate, and eventually to the New World in command of a ship he has captured. Society and the underworld are of a different stripe in New York, but a brigand is still forced to keep several jumps ahead of the law. Johnnie meets new friends, effects new and daring paces, and finds himself used as a pawn in the game played by the English and the French in pre-Revolutionary days in America. His great yearning to be a gentleman is seldom absent from his mind, but fulfillment of that desire comes in an unexpected and surprising way!
Download or read book A Response to Industrialism written by Kim McQuaid and published by Beard Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a reprint of a previously published doctoral dissertation. It describes and analyzes the reformist experimentations undertaken by Capitalists from 1886 to 1960.
Download or read book Imperial San Francisco written by Gray Brechin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-10-03 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ""Imperial San Francisco" provides a myth-shattering interpretation of the hidden costs that the growth of San Francisco has exacted on its surrounding regions, presenting along the way a revolutionary new theory of urban development".--"Palo Alto Daily News". 86 photos.
Download or read book The Gate The True Story of the Design and Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge written by John van der Zee and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2024-03-30 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “John van der Zee has... mastered the technical details of [his] subject... [he has] used [his] talents as writer... to narrate not only the technical but also the human drama involved in bringing the concept of a great bridge to fruition. Engineering projects necessarily involve a large cast of characters, and van der Zee has portrayed his as deftly as a novelist might. The engineers in this book come alive as people, with all the faults and foibles associated with the human species. The story of the Golden Gate Bridge is principally the story of its chief engineer, Joseph Strauss, and he is both hero and villain of the piece... Strauss claimed he could build a bridge for under $25 million, and in 1921 produced an ungainly design that was priced at $17 million. The next lowest estimate was still four or five times as high... How Strauss’s ugly duckling evolved into the beautiful Golden Gate Bridge is a fascinating tale. It is complete with revelations about how Charles Ellis, a classics scholar and self-taught bridge engineer, really translated Strauss’s conceptual design into an engineering reality. The falling out between Strauss and Ellis, resulting in the latter being denied any official credit for his work on the bridge, was true tragedy... the history of the bridge itself... is a case study of personal and technological adventure bordering on hubris... John van der Zee has captured all of this in a fascinating book that shows that the best of cutting-edge engineering is much, much more than science and technology.” — Nature “John van der Zee tells the story of the [Golden Gate Bridge’s] creation, and while its realization was a complicated act of finance, politics and architecture, it was, above all, a masterpiece of engineering. Until The Gate... the authorship of its structural design was obscured by the practice — still common among many design firms — of attributing credit to the head of the firm responsible for the project... Joseph Strauss... But the book — organized like a whodunit — reveals that neither Strauss nor the famous New York engineers who worked as consultants really engineered the bridge... The book is not only a tribute to what the author calls ‘a democratic masterpiece.’ It also sets the record straight: it was Ellis who did it.“ — The New York Times “[A]n impressively researched, carefully crafted biography of the [Golden Gate] bridge and the ambitious men who built it. Two strong personalities dominate this tale: Michael O’Shaughnessy, City Engineer of S.F. who rebuilt the city after the earthquake of 1912 and who long dreamed of bridging the Golden Gate, and Joseph Strauss, the ambitious engineer who designed the standard form of drawbridge. In a propaganda struggle that lasted for more than a decade and which is presented in all its fascinating minutiae by van der Zee, the two slowly persuaded the city that a Golden Gate bridge was feasible mechanically and financially... van der Zee re-creates the grueling, Herculean task of construction... does a commendable job of vivifying the story of the bridge.” — Kirkus
Download or read book The Political Party Matrix written by J. P. Monroe and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2001-04-12 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that the political party remains an institution whose primary purpose is to allow elites to coordinate their activities in the political area.
Download or read book Horse Racing the Chicago Way written by Steven A. Riess and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-08 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chicago may seem a surprising choice for studying thoroughbred racing, especially since it was originally a famous harness racing town and did not get heavily into thoroughbred racing until the 1880s. However, Chicago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was second only to New York as a center of both thoroughbred racing and off-track gambling. Horse Racing the Chicago Way shines a light on this fascinating, complicated history, exploring the role of political influence and class in the rise and fall of thoroughbred racing; the business of racing; the cultural and social significance of racing; and the impact widespread opposition to gambling in Illinois had on the sport. Riess also draws attention to the nexus that existed between horse racing, politics, and syndicate crime, as well as the emergence of neighborhood bookmaking, and the role of the national racing wire in Chicago. Taking readers from the grandstands of Chicago’s finest tracks to the underworld of crime syndicates and downtown poolrooms, Riess brings to life this understudied era of sports history.
Download or read book American Police written by Thomas A. Reppetto and published by Enigma Books. This book was released on 2010-12-28 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its beginnings in eighteenth-century London, this is the history of the largest urban police departments in the United States and a social portrait of America during the first century of its existence. From the birth of the New York City Police Department in 1845 to the end of World War II, each city had its share of crime, murders, vice, drug dealers, and addicts. Boston, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Los Angeles each had their own history and developed in different ways according to local realities. But in every case, each police department had to deal with its share of good and bad cops, Pinkertons, gangsters, revolutionists, politicians, reporters, muckrakers, arsonists, murderers, district attorneys, strikers, labor spies, hanging judges, and axe-swinging crusaders, as well as every conceivable element of American society high and low. But American Police also offers a view of the FBI and its legendary director, J. Edgar Hoover; District Attorney Earl Warren and police commissioners such as Teddy Roosevelt, Stephen J. O'Meara, Richard Enright, Grover Whalen, Louis J. Valentine, and August Vollmer; and tough cops like Captain William "Clubber" Williams, Johnny "the Boff" Broderick, and John Cordes. It is also the history of crime over the course of a century that transformed the United States from a former colony of the British Empire to a powerful and restless nation poised for spectacular growth. Thomas A. Reppetto, a former commander of detectives, is the author of NYPD and American Mafia.
Download or read book Imperial San Francisco written by Gray Brechin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-10-03 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1999, this celebrated history of San Francisco traces the exploitation of both local and distant regions by prominent families—the Hearsts, de Youngs, Spreckelses, and others—who gained power through mining, ranching, water and energy, transportation, real estate, weapons, and the mass media. The story uncovered by Gray Brechin is one of greed and ambition on an epic scale. Brechin arrives at a new way of understanding urban history as he traces the connections between environment, economy, and technology and discovers links that led, ultimately, to the creation of the atomic bomb and the nuclear arms race. In a new preface, Brechin considers the vulnerability of cities in the post-9/11 twenty-first century.
Download or read book America s Sherlock Holmes written by William R. Hunt and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Burns is best known as ‘America’s Sherlock Holmes’ and was director of the FBI, shortly before J. Edgar Hoover. But before he became director, Burns had a long, highly publicized career as a detective for the Secret Service, then led the famed Burns International Detective Agency, which competed with his rival, the Pinkerton Detective Agency.
Download or read book The White Devil s Daughters written by Julia Flynn Siler and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the first hundred years of Chinese immigration--from 1848 to 1943--San Francisco was home to a shockingly extensive underground slave trade in Asian women, who were exploited as prostitutes and indentured servants. In this gripping, necessary book, bestselling author Julia Flynn Siler shines a light on this little-known chapter in our history--and gives us a vivid portrait of the safe house to which enslaved women escaped. The Occidental Mission Home, situated on the edge of Chinatown, served as a gateway to freedom for thousands. Run by a courageous group of female Christian abolitionists, it survived earthquakes, fire, bubonic plague, and violent attacks. We meet Dolly Cameron, who ran the home from 1899 to 1934, and Tien Fuh Wu, who arrived at the house as a young child after her abuse as a household slave drew the attention of authorities. Wu would grow up to become Cameron's translator, deputy director, and steadfast friend. Siler shows how Dolly and her colleagues defied convention and even law--physically rescuing young girls from brothels, snatching them from their smugglers--and how they helped bring the exploiters to justice. Riveting and revelatory, The White Devil's Daughters is a timely, extraordinary account of oppression, resistance, and hope.
Download or read book Front page Detective written by William R. Hunt and published by Popular Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William J. Burns (1880-1930) was the immediate succor of J. Edgar Hoover at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He had taken the director's job when Warren Harding was elected and appointed Burns' friend, Harry Daugherty, as Attorney General. Both Daugherty and Burns misused their offices and were forced to resign.
