by Erik Larson (2003)
Erik Larson intertwines the true tale of the 1893 World's Fair and the cunning serial killer who used the magic and majesty of the Columbian Exposition to lure his victims to their death. Daniel Burnham, the fair’s brilliant architect, builds the White City, while Dr. H. H. Holmes constructs his infamous "Murder Castle" nearby.
S.C. Gwynne
S.C. Gwynne’s Pulitzer finalist epic chronicles the four-decade war between the Comanches—the most formidable horse warriors in history—and Spanish, Mexican, and American settlers for control of the Great Plains.
Wayne Bethard
Powder papers, booty balls, and sugar tits- Lotions, Potions, and Deadly Elixirs has a cure for whatever ails! These quaint names were given to popular medicinal forms during America's frontier era that were said to cure everything from fallen arches to a broken windmill. Grandmas, mommas, and even certified physicians treated the sick, lame, and unlucky with what was available: barbed wire and horseshoe nails, cactus, pokeweed, buckeyes, you name it. Ironically, a lot of these homespun treatments actually worked. In Lotions, Potions, and Deadly Elixirs, a practicing pharmacist takes a light-hearted look at the most popular medicines from the frontier days and how they were intended to work. -- Provided by publisher. Gives an account of early-day medicines and medical practitioners during the past two to three centuries in America.
Mark Twain
Mark Twain created the memorable characters Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn drawing from the experiences of boys he grew up with in Missouri. Set by the Mississippi River in the 1840's, it follows these boys as they get into predicament after predicament. Tom's classic whitewashing of the fence has become part of American legend, and the book paints a nostalgic picture of life in the middle of the nineteenth century. Tom runs away from home to an island in the river, chases Injun Joe and his treasure, and even gets trapped in a cave for days with Becky Thatcher. The book is one of Twain's most beloved stories.
Friedrich Kittler
"Part technological history of the emergent new media in the late nineteenth century, past theoretical discussion of the responses to these media - including texts by Rilke, Kafka, and Heidegger, as well as elaborations by Edison, Bell, Turing, and other innovators - Gramphone, Film, Typewriter analyzes this momentous shift using insights from the work of Foucault, Lacan, and McLuhan. Fusing discourse analysis, structuralist psychoanalysis, and media theory, and the author adds a vital historical dimension to the current debates over the relationship between electronic literacy and poststructuralism, and the extent to which we are constituted by our technologies."--BOOK JACKET.