Black and white photographs are provided. The fifth edition adds a chapter on a

    Created in the 1890s by George Washington Vanderbilt, a member of one of America's wealthiest families, the estate combined a 250-room French Renaissance-style chateau with 125,000 acres of gardens, forests, and working farms. Biltmore House served as Vanderbilt's primary residence for almost 20 years. After Mr. Vanderbilt's death in 1914, life at Biltmore continued for his wife Edith and daughter Cornelia. In 1930, Cornelia Vanderbilt Cecil and her husband, Hon. John Francis Amherst Cecil, opened Biltmore House--the largest private home in the United States--to the public, firmly establishing the Asheville area as a major tourist destination.

    Focusing on the village of Elton, in the English East Midlands, the Gieses detail the agricultural advances that made communal living possible, explain what domestic life was like for serf and lord alike, and describe the central role of the church in maintaining social harmony. Though the main focus is on Elton, c. 1300, the Gieses supply enlightening historical context on the origin, development, and decline of the European village, itself an invention of the Middle Ages.Meticulously researched, Life in a Medieval Village is a remarkable account that illustrates the captivating world of the Middle Ages and demonstrates what it was like to live during a fascinating—and often misunderstood—era.

    Reporters flocked to the scene. Well-known columnists took up conspicuous seats in the courtroom. The defendant was relentlessly scrutinized for signs of guilt or innocence. Everyone—rich and poor, suffragists and social conservatives, legal scholars and laypeople—had an opinion about Lizzie Borden’s guilt or innocence.The popular fascination with the Borden murders and its central, enigmatic character has endured for more than a hundred years, but the legend often outstrips the story. Based on transcripts of the Borden legal proceedings, contemporary newspaper articles, previously withheld lawyer's journals, unpublished local reports, and recently unearthed letters from Lizzie herself, The Trial of Lizzie Borden is a definitive account of the Borden murder case and offers a window into America in the Gilded Age, showcasing its most deeply held convictions and its most troubling social anxieties.

    Maybe your teacher took the controversial stand that the Civil War was all about states’ rights… or maybe you learned all about the horrors slavery, but never quite figured out why things didn’t get better after the war ended. If you didn’t go to school in the United States, things are even more confusing. When the media is full of references to the Confederate flag, the legacy of slavery, and poverty in the American South, you might have a vague sense that things are bad because of the Civil War… but why? Why does a war that happened over a hundred and fifty years ago still cast a shadow over the United States? This book will tell you why. It will lead you, step-by-step, through the causes of the Civil War, and the effects. But unlike your high school history teacher, it won’t put you to sleep with long-winded biographies and lists of dates. The names you’ll learn are the big players, the ones with big personalities, who made big differences. In just a few minutes a day, you can read bite-sized stories from the Civil War – quick, easy explanations to guide you through the main points, with just enough scary, surprising, or just plain strange facts to keep you coming back for more. Each chapter ends with a bonus helping of trivia and some quick questions to test your knowledge. By the time you’re finished, you’ll know all the facts your history teacher never taught you – from who said slavery was a “positive good” (and why they thought that), to who dressed up in women’s clothing to escape from Union soldiers.

    Now this instant classic has been completely updated, outfitted with a whole new arsenal of indispensable knowledge on global affairs, popular culture, economic trends, scientific principles, and modern arts. Here's your chance to brush up on all those subjects you slept through in school, reacquaint yourself with all the facts you once knew (then promptly forgot), catch up on major developments in the world today, and become the Renaissance man or woman you always knew you could be! How do you tell the Balkans from the Caucasus? What's the difference between fission and fusion? Whigs and Tories? Shiites and Sunnis? Deduction and induction? Why aren't all Shakespearean comedies necessarily thigh-slappers? What are transcendental numbers and what are they good for? What really happened in Plato's cave? Is postmodernism dead or just having a bad hair day? And for extra credit, when should you use the adjective continual and when should you use continuous? An Incomplete Education answers these and thousands of other questions with incomparable wit, style, and clarity. American Studies, Art History, Economics, Film, Literature, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, Religion, Science, and World History: Here's the bottom line on each of these major disciplines, distilled to its essence and served up with consummate flair.

    

    Agnew, Richard Nixon's second-in-command. Long on firebrand rhetoric and short on political experience, Agnew had carried out a bribery and extortion ring in office for years, when--at the height of Watergate--three young federal prosecutors discovered his crimes and launched a mission to take him down before it was too late. Before Nixon's downfall made way for Agnew to ascend to the presidency himself. Agnew did everything he could to bury their investigation: dismissing it as a "witch hunt," riling up his partisan base, making the press the enemy, and, with a crumbling circle of loyalists, scheming to obstruct justice.In this blockbuster account, Rachel Maddow and Michael Yarvitz detail the investigation that exposed Agnew's crimes, the attempts at a cover-up - which involved future President George H. W. Bush - and the bargain that forced Agnew's resignation but also spared him years in federal prison. Based on the hit podcast, Bag Man expands and deepens the story of Spiro Agnew's scandal and its lasting influence on our politics, our media, and our understanding of what it takes to confront a criminal in the White House.

    The Rosetta Stone, Troy, Nineveh's Assyrian Library, King Tut's Tomb, Machu Picchu, Pompeii, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Thera, Olduvai Gorge, and the Tomb of 10,000 Warriors--Hunt reveals the fascinating stories of these amazing discoveries and explains the ways in which they added to our knowledge of human history and permanently altered our worldview. Part travel guide to the wonders of the world and part primer on ancient world history, Ten Discoveries That Rewrote History captures the awe and excitement of finding a lost window into ancient civilization.

    This world-famous bestseller has withstood the test of time, inspiring countless books and films, including the author's own popular sequel, The Eyes of the Sphinx. But here is where it all began--von Daniken's startling theories of our earliest encounters with alien worlds, based upon his lifelong studies of ancient ruins, lost cities, potential spaceports, and a myriad of hard scientific facts that point to extraterrestrial intervention in human history. Most incredible of all, however, is von Daniken's theory that we ourselves are the descendants of these galactic pioneers--and the archeological discoveries that prove it... * An alien astronaut preserved in a pyramid * Thousand-year-old spaceflight navigation charts * Computer astronomy from Incan and Egyptian ruins * A map of the land beneath the ice cap of Antarctica * A giant spaceport discovered in the Andes Includes remarkable photos that document mankind's first contact with aliens at the dawn of civilization.

    It is a haunting and frequently eye-opening saga—one that reveals a startling link between what we build and how we live. With Frye as our raconteur-guide, we journey back to a time before barriers of brick and stone even existed—to an era in which nomadic tribes vied for scarce resources, and each man was bred to a life of struggle. Ultimately, those same men would create edifices of mud, brick, and stone, and with them effectively divide humanity: on one side were those the walls protected; on the other, those the walls kept out. The stars of this narrative are the walls themselves—rising up in places as ancient and exotic as Mesopotamia, Babylon, Greece, China, Rome, Mongolia, Afghanistan, the lower Mississippi and even Central America. As we journey across time and place, we discover a hidden, thousand-mile-long wall in Asia’s steppes; learn of bizarre Spartan rituals; watch Mongol chieftains lead their miles-long hordes; witness the epic siege of Constantinople; chill at the fate of French explorers; marvel at the folly of the Maginot Line; tense at the gathering crisis in Cold War Berlin; gape at Hollywood’s gated royalty; and contemplate the wall mania of our own era. A masterpiece of historical recovery and preeminent storytelling, Walls is alternately evocative, amusing, chilling, and deeply insightful as it gradually reveals the startling ways that barriers have affected our psyches. The questions this book summons are both intriguing and profound: Did walls make civilization possible? And can we live without them?

    In Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, Tygiel penned a classic work, a landmark book that towers above most writing about the sport. Now he ranges across the last century and a half in anintriguing look at baseball as history, and history as reflected in baseball.In Past Time, Tygiel gives us a seat behind home plate, where we catch the ongoing interplay of baseball and American society. We begin in New York in the 1850s, where pre-Civil War nationalism shaped the emergence of a national pastime. We witness the true birth of modern baseball with thedevelopment of its elaborate statistics--the brainchild of English-born reformer, Henry Chadwick. Chadwick, Tygiel writes, created the sport's historical essence and even imparted a moral dimension to the game with his concepts of errors and unearned runs. Tygiel offers equally insightfullooks at the role of rags-to-riches player-owners in the formation of the upstart American League and he describes the complex struggle to establish African-American baseball in a segregated world. He also examines baseball during the Great Depression (when Branch Rickey and Larry MacPhail savedthe game by perfecting the farm system, night baseball, and radio broadcasts), the ironies of Bobby Thomson's immortal shot heard 'round the world, the rapid relocation of franchises in the 1950s and 1960s, and the emergence of rotisserie leagues and fantasy camps in the 1980s.In Past Time, Jules Tygiel provides baseball history with a difference. Instead of a pitch-by-pitch account of great games, in this groundbreaking book, the field is American history and baseball itself is the star.

    There is Edward Oxford, who shot at Queen Victoria, and Richard Dadd, the brilliant artist and murderer of his father. There is also William Chester Minor, the surgeon from America who killed a stranger in London, and then played a key part in creating the world's finest dictionary. Finally, there is Christiana Edmunds, ‘The Chocolate Cream Poisoner’ and frustrated lover.To these four tales are added new ones, previously unknown. There were five women who went on to become mothers in Broadmoor, giving birth to life when three of them had previously taken it. Then there were the numerous escapes, actual and attempted, as the first doctors tried to assert control over their residents.These are stories from the edge of where true crime meets mental illness. Broadmoor Revealed recounts what life was like for the criminally insane, over one hundred years ago.

    A book that breaks new ground, dispels myths, and reinforces the special nature of being a redhead, with a look at multiple disciplines, including science, religion, politics, feminism and sexuality, literature, and art. With an obsessive fascination that is as contagious as it is compelling, author Jacky Colliss Harvey (herself a redhead) begins her exploration of red hair in prehistory and traces the redhead gene as it made its way out of Africa with the early human diaspora to its emergence under Northern skies. She goes on to explore red hair in the ancient world; the prejudice manifested against red hair across medieval Europe; red hair during the Renaissance as both an indicator of Jewishness during the Inquisition and the height of fashion in Protestant England, under the reign of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I; the modern age of art and literature, and the first positive symbols of red hair in children's characters; modern medicine and science and the genetic and chemical decoding of red hair; and finally, red hair in contemporary culture, from advertising and exploitation to "gingerism" and the new movement against bullying.

    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 so secretive that, at the time of her death at age 104, no new photograph of her had been seen in decades. Though she owned palatial homes in California, New York, and Connecticut, why had she lived for twenty years in a simple hospital room, despite being in excellent health? Why were her valuables being sold off? Was she in control of her fortune, or controlled by those managing her money?   Dedman has collaborated with Huguette Clark’s cousin, Paul Clark Newell, Jr., one of the few relatives to have frequent conversations with her. Dedman and Newell tell a fairy tale in reverse: the bright, talented daughter, born into a family of extreme wealth and privilege, who secrets herself away from the outside world.   Huguette was the daughter of self-made copper industrialist W. A. Clark, nearly as rich as Rockefeller in his day, a controversial senator, railroad builder, and founder of Las Vegas. She grew up in the largest house in New York City, a remarkable dwelling with 121 rooms for a family of four. She owned paintings by Degas and Renoir, a world-renowned Stradivarius violin, a vast collection of antique dolls. But wanting more than treasures, she devoted her wealth to buying gifts for friends and strangers alike, to quietly pursuing her own work as an artist, and to guarding the privacy she valued above all else.   The Clark family story spans nearly all of American history in three generations, from a log cabin in Pennsylvania to mining camps in the Montana gold rush, from backdoor politics in Washington to a distress call from an elegant Fifth Avenue apartment. The same Huguette who was touched by the terror attacks of 9/11 held a ticket nine decades earlier for a first-class stateroom on the second voyage of the Titanic. Empty Mansions reveals a complex portrait of the mysterious Huguette and her intimate circle. We meet her extravagant father, her publicity-shy mother, her star-crossed sister, her French boyfriend, her nurse who received more than $30 million in gifts, and the relatives fighting to inherit Huguette’s copper fortune. Richly illustrated with more than seventy photographs, Empty Mansions is an enthralling story of an eccentric of the highest order, a last jewel of the Gilded Age who lived life on her own terms.The No. 1 New York Times bestseller. Best nonfiction books of the year at Goodreads, Amazon.com, and Barnes & Noble. One of the New York Times critic Janet Maslin's 10 favorite books of 2013.