Download or read book When the Astors Owned New York written by Justin Kaplan and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-06-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this marvelous anecdotal history, Justin Kaplan––Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Mark Twain––vividly brings to life a glittering, bygone age. Endowed with the largest private fortunes of their day, cousins John Jacob Astor IV and William Waldorf Astor vied for primacy in New York society, producing the grandest hotels ever seen in a marriage of ostentation and efficiency that transformed American social behavior. Kaplan exposes it all in exquisite detail, taking readers from the 1890s to the Roaring Twenties in a combination of biography, history, architectural appreciation, and pure reading pleasure

Download or read book The Astors written by Virginia Cowles and published by . This book was released on 2017-07-03 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Astors; whose immense fortune came from furs, ships, and real estate; whose mansions bejewelled Fifth Avenue, Newport, and England; who became leaders - first in America, then in Britain. Discusses the members of five generations of the Astor family, from John Jacob Astor's arrival in America in 1783 to the present."--

Download or read book The Second Mrs Astor written by Shana Abe and published by Kensington Publishing Corporation. This book was released on 2021-08-31 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After losing her husband on the RMS Titanic, Madeleine Astor, who is constantly surrounded by scandal, finds her status elevated to that of a virtuous, tragic heroine and must decide whether to accept the role assigned to her or carve out her own extraordinary path.

Download or read book John Jacob Astor written by John Denis Haeger and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biography of John Jacob Astor's life and his career as a merchant, fur trader, and land speculator as vehicles for examining several important themes and issues in American economic and urban development between 1790 and 1860. John Jacob Astor was the best-known and most important American businessman for more than a half-century. His career encompassed the country's formative economic years from the precarious days following the American Revolution to the emergence of an urban-centered manufacturing economy in the late 1840s. Change was the dominant motif of the period, and Astor either exemplified the varied economic, social, and political changes in his business career or he directly affected the course of events. In this biography of John Jacob Astor, John Denis Haeger uses Astor's life and his career as a merchant, fur trader, and land speculator as vehicles for examining several important themes and issues in American economic and urban development between 1790 and 1860. Haeger addresses, in fascinating detail, the complexity of Astor's business endeavors, his extensive connections with the country's dominant political figures, and the "modern" business strategies and managerial techniques that he used to build his business empire. Astor was clearly not a business revolutionary who radically altered an existing system. He was, however, an entrepreneur who exerted a profound change on an industry. He fascinated his contemporaries precisely because he so mirrored his age and its changing business and economic patterns. He grasped the greater size and complexity of an emerging commercial economy in post-Revolutionary America and adopted strategies and structures that transformed the fur and China trades. His investment in city real estate, stocks, bonds, and even a western city made him part of America's evolution into an urbanindustrial society. For his era, John Astor's career was remarkable for its modernity, vision, and reflection of American economic and political values. More than just a personal biography, John Jacob Astor combines economic theories with a fascinating narrative that demonstrates, like no other book has, Astor's impact on the early republic.

Download or read book The Astors written by Lucy Kavaler and published by Toronto, Harrap. This book was released on 1966 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book John Jacob Astor written by Axel Madsen and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2002-03-14 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On The Deal Maker: How William C. Durant Made General Motors: "A well-written biography."-New York Times On Stanwyck: The Life and Times of Barbara Stanwyck: "Madsen's admirably researched, insightful portrait of her aloof nature . . . reveals she was always torn between her wish to give of herself and her need to be in control."-Christian Science Monitor On Chanel: A Woman of Her Own: "Fascinating . . . . Takes the reader behind the coromandel veneers of Chanel's life."-New York Times Book Review "Carefully knits together the complex pattern of Chanel's complicated existence. It's not an easy task."-Toronto Globe and Mail On Gloria and Joe: "Axel Madsen finally gives the public a fascinating chronicle of the romance that could have ruined more than two careers."-Dallas Morning News On Cousteau: "Both critical and understanding. And it is exceptionally readable. Readers are well advised to take the plunge."-Chicago Tribune On Malraux: "Will stand as the best of more than a dozen books about Malraux in print."-Kansas City Star

Download or read book The Astor Orphan written by Alexandra Aldrich and published by Ecco. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Astor Orphan is an unflinching debut memoir by a direct descendant of John Jacob Astor, Alexandra Aldrich. She brilliantly tells the story of her eccentric, fractured family; her 1980s childhood of bohemian neglect in the squalid attic of Rokeby, the family’s Hudson Valley Mansion; and her brave escape from the clan. Aldrich reaches back to the Gilded Age when the Astor legacy began to come undone, leaving the Aldrich branch of the family penniless and squabbling over what was left. Illustrated with black-and-white photographs that bring this faded world into focus, The Astor Orphan is written with the grit of The Glass Castle and set amid the aristocratic decay of Grey Gardens.

Download or read book Mrs Astor s New York written by Eric Homberger and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2004-09-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mrs Astor, queen of New York society in the decades before World War I, used her prestige to create a social aristocracy in the city. Mrs Astor's story, told here by Eric Homberger, sheds light on the origins, extravagant lifestyle, and social competitiveness of this aristocracy.

Download or read book Astoria written by Peter Stark and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of The Lost City of Z and Skeletons in the Zahara, Astoria is the thrilling, true-adventure tale of the 1810 Astor Expedition, an epic, now forgotten, three-year journey to forge an American empire on the Pacific Coast. Peter Stark offers a harrowing saga in which a band of explorers battled nature, starvation, and madness to establish the first American settlement in the Pacific Northwest and opened up what would become the Oregon trail, permanently altering the nation's landscape and its global standing. Six years after Lewis and Clark's began their journey to the Pacific Northwest, two of the Eastern establishment's leading figures, John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson, turned their sights to founding a colony akin to Jamestown on the West Coast and transforming the nation into a Pacific trading power. Author and correspondent for Outside magazine Peter Stark recreates this pivotal moment in American history for the first time for modern readers, drawing on original source material to tell the amazing true story of the Astor Expedition. Unfolding over the course of three years, from 1810 to 1813, Astoria is a tale of high adventure and incredible hardship in the wilderness and at sea. Of the more than one hundred-forty members of the two advance parties that reached the West Coast—one crossing the Rockies, the other rounding Cape Horn—nearly half perished by violence. Others went mad. Within one year, the expedition successfully established Fort Astoria, a trading post on the Columbia River. Though the colony would be short-lived, it opened provincial American eyes to the potential of the Western coast and its founders helped blaze the Oregon Trail.

Download or read book The Last Mrs Astor A New York Story written by Frances Kiernan and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2008-05-17 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Kiernan's sharp-eyed biography brings back a woman who, far into her 90s, relished the dance of life." —O, The Oprah Magazine This biography, based on firsthand knowledge and interviews with Mrs. Astor’s friends and the heads of New York’s great cultural institutions, gives us back the woman so loved and admired. At the age of 51, Brooke Astor wedded the notoriously ill-tempered Vincent Astor, who died in 1959. In a highly publicized courtroom battle, she fought off an attempt to break Vincent’s will, which left $67 million to the Vincent Astor Foundation. As the foundation’s president, Mrs. Astor would use this legacy to benefit New York City. She would personally visit every grant applicant and charm anyone she met. At her hundredth birthday, princes and presidents honored her, but in 2006 a grandson petitioned the courts to have his father removed as Brooke’s guardian. Once again an Astor court battle became the stuff of headlines.

Download or read book John Jacob Astor and the First Great American Fortune written by Alexander Emmerich and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2013-08-07 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This biography analyzes Astor's rise from poor German immigrant in 1784 to the first modern millionaire--he was one before the term "millionaire" entered the English language. Many consider him to be the fourth wealthiest American of all times. After his death in 1848, the public began to discuss the "responsibility" of a millionaire. Some argued that he must have been greedy and cold. Some voices demanded that he should have given all his money back to the United States. More liberal thinkers praised him for his genius and vision. This biography presents a balanced picture. Astor was the founder of the first American settlement on the Pacific (Astoria, Oregon) and of New York's fine hotels the Astor House and the Waldorf-Astoria, as well as a developer of the American West and a fur trader. Many American cities and sites are named after him. He donated the Astor Library to the city of New York (it became the first public library of the city), now part of the New York Public Library.

Download or read book Mrs Astor Regrets written by Meryl Gordon and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2008 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gordon's powerful, poignant saga goes behind the gates of a powerful American dynasty--the Astors--to tell of three generations' worth of longing and missed opportunities, which ultimately led to the empire's unraveling.

Download or read book A Season of Splendor written by Greg King and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Journey through the splendor and the excesses of the Gilded Age "Every aspect of life in the Gilded Age took on deeper, transcendent meaning intended to prove the greatness of America: residences beautified their surroundings; works of art uplifted and were shared with the public; clothing exhibited evidence of breeding; jewelry testified to cultured taste and wealth; dinners demonstrated sophisticated palates; and balls rivaled those of European courts in their refinement. The message was unmistakable: the United States had arrived culturally, and Caroline Astor and her circle were intent on leading the nation to unimagined heights of glory."—From A Season of Splendor Take a dazzling journey through the Gilded Age, the period from roughly the 1870s to 1914, when bluebloods from older, established families met the nouveau riche headlong—railway barons, steel magnates, and Wall Street speculators—and forged an uneasy and glittering new society in New York City. The best of the best were Caroline Astor's 400 families, and she shaped and ruled this high society with steel. A Season of Splendor is a panoramic sweep across this sumptuous landscape, presenting the families, the wealth, the balls, the clothing, and the mansions in vivid detail—as well as the shocking end of the era with the sinking of the Titanic.

Download or read book Mary Astor s Purple Diary The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936 written by Edward Sorel and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A hilarious send-up of sex, scandal, and the Golden Age of Hollywood by legendary cartoonist Edward Sorel. In 1965, a young, up-and-coming illustrator by the name of Edward Sorel tore away layer after layer of linoleum from the floor of his $97-a-month Manhattan apartment until he discovered a hidden treasure: issues of the New York Daily News and Daily Mirror from 1936, each ablaze with a scandalous child custody trial taking place in Hollywood starring the actress Mary Astor—and the journal in which she detailed her numerous affairs. Thus began a half-century obsession that reached its peak in Mary Astor’s Purple Diary, “a thoroughly charming” (New York Times Book Review, front-page review) account of the scandal in which Sorel narrates and illustrates the travails of the Oscar-winning actress alongside his own personal story of discovering an unlikely muse. Now in a stunning paperback, featuring more than sixty ribald and rapturous original illustrations, Mary Astor’s Purple Diary is the life’s masterpiece of one of America’s greatest illustrators.

Download or read book The Astor Family written by John D. Gates and published by Doubleday Books. This book was released on 1981 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Jacob Astor (1763-1846) immigrated from Germany to America via England in 1784. He married Sarah Todd in 1785 and they settled in New York, but he had enterprises in Canada, the Midwest and the West where he plied the fur trade. Descendants have remained chiefly in the East.

Download or read book The Astors written by Lucy Kavaler and published by Toronto, Harrap. This book was released on 1966 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Murder on Astor Place written by Victoria Thompson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1999-05-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first novel in the national bestselling Gaslight Mystery series introduces Sarah Brandt, a midwife in the turn-of-the-century tenements of Manhattan who refuses to turn a blind eye to the injustices of the crime-ridden city… After a routine delivery, Sarah visits her patient in a rooming house—and discovers that another boarder, a young girl, has been killed. At the request of Sergeant Frank Malloy, she searches the girl’s room. She discovers that the victim is from one of the most prominent families in New York—and the sister of an old friend. The powerful family, fearful of scandal, refuses to permit an investigation. But with Malloy’s help, Sarah begins a dangerous quest to bring the killer to justice—before death claims another victim...