Book picks similar to
Three Bullets Sealed His Lips by Bruce A. Rubenstein
law-enforcement
mafia-wish-list
true-crime
truth-is-stranger-than-fiction
The Orphan Train Movement: The History of the Program that Relocated Homeless Children Across America
Charles River Editors - 2016
They were not the best answer, but they were the first attempts at finding a practical system. Many children that would have died, lived to have children and grandchildren. It has been calculated that over two million descendants have come from these children. The trains gave the children a fighting chance to grow up." – D. Bruce Ayler By the middle of the 19th century, New York City’s population surpassed the unfathomable number of 1 million people, despite its obvious lack of space. This was mostly due to the fact that so many immigrants heading to America naturally landed in New York Harbor, well before the federal government set up an official immigration system on Ellis Island. At first, the city itself set up its own immigration registration center in Castle Garden near the site of the original Fort Amsterdam, and naturally, many of these immigrants, who were arriving with little more than the clothes on their back, didn’t travel far and thus remained in New York. Of course, the addition of so many immigrants and others with less money put strains on the quality of life. Between 1862 and 1872, the number of tenements had risen from 12,000 to 20,000; the number of tenement residents grew from 380,000 to 600,000. One notorious tenement on the East River, Gotham Court, housed 700 people on a 20-by-200-foot lot. Another on the West Side was home, incredibly, to 3,000 residents, who made use of hundreds of privies dug into a fifteen-foot-wide inner court. Squalid, dark, crowded, and dangerous, tenement living created dreadful health and social conditions. It would take the efforts of reformers such as Jacob Riis, who documented the hellishness of tenements with shocking photographs in How the Other Half Lives, to change the way such buildings were constructed. While the Melting Pot nature of America is one of its most unique and celebrated aspects, the conditions also created a humanitarian crisis of sorts. In the 19th century, child labor was still the norm, especially for poor families, and no social welfare systems were in place to provide security for people. As a result, if a child was abandoned or orphaned, they were at the mercy of an ad hoc system of barely tolerable orphanages with little to no centralization. Minorities and immigrants were also discriminated against on the basis of ethnicity and religion. Into this issue stepped the Children’s Aid Society, led by Charles Loring Brace, who determined he could improve abandoned kids’ futures by helping relocate them further to the West, which would also help Americans settle the frontier. By coordinating with train companies, Brace was able to transport dozens of children at a time to places in the heartland of America or further out west, where they would end up in new homes, decades before the existence of foster care. Genealogist Roberta Lowrey, a descendant of one of these orphans, noted that the situations for many of those on the Orphan Trains were vastly different, but in all, the system worked: “Many were used as strictly slave farm labor, but there are stories, wonderful stories of children ending up in fine families that loved them, cherished them, [and] educated them. They were so much better off than if they had been left on the streets of New York. ... They were just not going to survive, or if they had, their fate would surely have been awful.
Evil Obsession the Annie Cook Story
Nellie Snyder Yost - 1991
Book by Yost, Nellie Snyder
JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated
Douglas Horne - 2014
Kennedy, the response has been: Why would the U.S. national-security establishment — that is, the military and the CIA — kill Kennedy? As Douglas P. Horne details in this ebook, JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated, the answer is because Kennedy’s ideas about foreign-policy collided with those of the U.S. national-security establishment during the height of the Cold War. In the eyes of the military and the CIA, Kennedy’s policies posed a grave threat to national security.Horne served as Chief Analyst for Military Records for the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). This was the federal agency that Congress established to secure the disclosure and release of JFK-related records and documents after the public outcry generated by Oliver Stone’s movie JFK. Horne is the author of Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK, a five-volume work that focuses primarily on the autopsy of Kennedy’s body that was conducted by the U.S. military.
THE BARREL MURDER - a Detective Joe Petrosino case (based on true events)
Michael Zarocostas - 2013
Two NYPD outcasts hunt for the killer: Detective Joe Petrosino (a stocky "Dago" nicknamed Bulldog Joe) and Inspector Max Schmittberger (a giant "Yid" nicknamed The Broom).Commissioner Teddy Roosevelt appointed Petrosino the first Italian-American detective in the NYPD and reinstated Schmittberger after The Broom confessed to grafting and blew the whistle on his fellow cops. By 1903, however, Roosevelt is in the White House, and Tammany Hall casts a long Irish shadow over the NYPD again. To complicate matters, investigative reporter Lincoln Steffens seeks Petrosino's help in finding out if there is a crooked lawman behind a gambling syndicate in the City.As they work the barrel murder, Petrosino and Schmittberger encounter a lunatic doctor, the Secret Service, vicious Sicilian mafiosi known as the Morello Gang, and a mysterious code that may unlock the secrets of the killing and Steffens' alleged syndicate.Note to the reader: This novel is based on an actual murder that occurred in New York City in 1903 and the criminal investigation that followed. Several of the main characters are real persons or inspired by real persons. Joe Petrosino, the central character, was the first Italian-American detective in the NYPD's Central Bureau appointed in 1895 by Teddy Roosevelt (then President of the Board of New York City Police Commissoners). Petrosino and a few other brave men protected the immigrant masses and fought against the most feared criminals in the city's history. Their story begins here.
London, Part 1 of 3
Edward Rutherfurd - 1998
He brings this vibrant city's long and noble history alive through the ever-shifting fortunes, fates, and intrigues of half-a-dozen families, from the age of Julius Caesar to the 20th century. Generation after generation, these families embody the passion, struggle, wealth, and verve of the greatest city in the world.
A Fearless Bride For A Wounded Rancher
Ember Pierce - 2020
For years, she felt as though she was just an object. She wants to be loved for who she is, not what she looks like. When her father tried to force her to marry the local banker, she decided to form her own destiny and answer a mail-order bride ad.Scott is now a ghost of his former self. He used to be the beloved town sheriff for years. During a horrific accident, he lost his fiance and one side of his face got disfigured. Having to live with his own failure, he turned in his badge and set off to live as a recluse.When Scott meets Mae, he'll try to push her away. He fears to get close to anyone because he couldn’t save the love of his life last time she needed him. But, as Mae's life is threatened by an outlaw gang, he will have to tame his inner demons and rise above fear.Mae was determined to break free from her old life. Will she be able to break through Scott's defenses and help him redeem himself? Or will his past ruin her dreams forever?If you like fast-paced clean romance and action-packed stories, you won't be able to put down this addictive Novel by Ember Pierce."A Fearless Bride For A Wounded Rancher" is a stand-alone Western Historical Romance Novel of approximately 500 pages.
The Transcontinental Railroad
John Hoyt Williams - 2019
The dream of a railroad across America had at last come true. This book tells the story of swaggering men with big plans, of an America emerging from the Civil War and reaching its manifest destiny. The men who imagined the transcontinental railroad were impassioned profiteers, an unlikely, often ruthless band, guilty of both financial double-dealing and ferocious ingenuity. When ice delayed operations in the Sierra Nevadas, the men of the Central Pacific formed the Summit Ice Company and sold their problem to California saloons. When herds of buffalo ripped up the tracks, the men of the Union Pacific brutally slaughtered tens of thousands of them. (Thus the legend of Buffalo Bill was born.) While his partners finagled in Washington and on Wall Street, Jack Casement, a former Union general, dressed in a fur coat, a Cossack hat, and shining cavalry boots and carrying a pistol and a bullwhip, drove the workers of the Union Pacific to new track-laying records. Meanwhile, from the West, thousands of Chinese immigrants blasted, climbed, and inched their way through the perilous California mountains. The railroad transformed the country forever. It decimated the Plains Indian culture by destroying the herds of buffalo that sustained it. It augmented the timber and steel industries; it opened up the West for commerce. Farms grew up along the length of the rails. Thousands of immigrants from Asia and Europe came here to build the iron road. Most important, it united a nation. The story of the railroad is capitalist theater, starring powerful politicians and generals and con artists. Set in opulent parlor cars, well-heeled boardrooms, and rowdy frontier towns, on desolate plains and deadly gorges, it is a story of vision and corruption, of empire building at its most vulgar and glorious. John Williams combines scholarship with personalities, historical analysis with plain old tall tales, to tell a story that will appeal to readers of American history and adventure and to lovers of the American West. The Transcontinental Railroad is an epic of every sense.
On the Trail of the Yorkshire Ripper: His Final Secrets Revealed
Richard Charles Cobb - 2019
until now.Using ground breaking new research together with the original police reports, newspaper descriptions and eye witness testimony, we can finally present the truth about what actually happened.For the first time in over four decades we re-examine the crime scenes and deliver the real story of the Yorkshire Ripper murders.
Swim Through the Darkness: My Search for Craig Smith and the Mystery of Maitreya Kali
Mike Stax - 2016
His future success seemed assured, until an unexpected turn of events plunged him into a terrifying darkness. Clean-cut Craig Smith became Maitreya Kali, the self-proclaimed psychedelic Messiah. He laid out his poignant, disturbing schizophrenic vision on a sprawling self-released double-album before disappearing completely. Author Mike Stax spent fifteen years piecing together the mystery of Maitreya Kali, uncovering one of the strangest and most tragic untold stories of the 1960s and ‘70s.Swim Through the Darkness reveals author Stax's fifteen year quest in tracking down this strange saga of American pop culture. Included in the story are Smith's close ties to the Monkees, particularly Mike Nesmith, who produced and promoted Smith's band, Penny Arkade. Also covered are the bizarre self-released albums he made as Maitreya Kali, which now command thousands of dollars among psychedelic music collectors.Purchasers of this book will also receive a code to be able to download Smith's music in all its obscure and variant styles.