Author: Adam Fortunate Eagle
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806145390
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Book Description
Adam Fortunate Eagle has been called many things: social activist, serious joke medicine, contrary warrior, national treasure, enemy of the state, living history. Characterizing his style as “Fortunate Eagle meets Mark Twain, Indian style,” the author relates the traditions, joys, and frustrations of his own Native American experience in tones ranging from “gut-busting laughter to pissed-off anger.” Leading the reader through time and space, Fortunate Eagle uses his own history—as a child in an Ojibwe community and later as a civil rights leader who, among other achievements, helped organize the takeovers of Alcatraz in 1964 and 1969—to recount the experience of modern Native peoples. The tradition of oral storytelling shines through his language and in his thoughtful and humorous juxtapositions. In the story for which the book is named, Fortunate Eagle journeys to Italy to “discover” the land and claim it in protest of Columbus Day. Wearing a traditional beaded buckskin outfit, complete with scalps hanging from his belt, he meets with the pope. Afterward, suffering from what he calls “the Pope’s Revenge,” he is forced to spend two days in or near a bathroom. Beginning with a foreword “written” by Sitting Bull, and traveling from moose encounters in Minnesota to the Spanish Steps in Rome, this book reminds readers of the wisdom of elders, the cross-cultural confusion of Native-white encounters, and some of the most difficult issues faced by contemporary Native peoples. Falling somewhere between fact and fiction, the tales in Scalping Columbus and Other Stories combine outrageous comedy with clever social commentary, managing both to entertain and to enlighten.
Scalping Columbus and Other Damn Indian Stories
Author: Adam Fortunate Eagle
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806145390
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Book Description
Adam Fortunate Eagle has been called many things: social activist, serious joke medicine, contrary warrior, national treasure, enemy of the state, living history. Characterizing his style as “Fortunate Eagle meets Mark Twain, Indian style,” the author relates the traditions, joys, and frustrations of his own Native American experience in tones ranging from “gut-busting laughter to pissed-off anger.” Leading the reader through time and space, Fortunate Eagle uses his own history—as a child in an Ojibwe community and later as a civil rights leader who, among other achievements, helped organize the takeovers of Alcatraz in 1964 and 1969—to recount the experience of modern Native peoples. The tradition of oral storytelling shines through his language and in his thoughtful and humorous juxtapositions. In the story for which the book is named, Fortunate Eagle journeys to Italy to “discover” the land and claim it in protest of Columbus Day. Wearing a traditional beaded buckskin outfit, complete with scalps hanging from his belt, he meets with the pope. Afterward, suffering from what he calls “the Pope’s Revenge,” he is forced to spend two days in or near a bathroom. Beginning with a foreword “written” by Sitting Bull, and traveling from moose encounters in Minnesota to the Spanish Steps in Rome, this book reminds readers of the wisdom of elders, the cross-cultural confusion of Native-white encounters, and some of the most difficult issues faced by contemporary Native peoples. Falling somewhere between fact and fiction, the tales in Scalping Columbus and Other Stories combine outrageous comedy with clever social commentary, managing both to entertain and to enlighten.
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806145390
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Book Description
Adam Fortunate Eagle has been called many things: social activist, serious joke medicine, contrary warrior, national treasure, enemy of the state, living history. Characterizing his style as “Fortunate Eagle meets Mark Twain, Indian style,” the author relates the traditions, joys, and frustrations of his own Native American experience in tones ranging from “gut-busting laughter to pissed-off anger.” Leading the reader through time and space, Fortunate Eagle uses his own history—as a child in an Ojibwe community and later as a civil rights leader who, among other achievements, helped organize the takeovers of Alcatraz in 1964 and 1969—to recount the experience of modern Native peoples. The tradition of oral storytelling shines through his language and in his thoughtful and humorous juxtapositions. In the story for which the book is named, Fortunate Eagle journeys to Italy to “discover” the land and claim it in protest of Columbus Day. Wearing a traditional beaded buckskin outfit, complete with scalps hanging from his belt, he meets with the pope. Afterward, suffering from what he calls “the Pope’s Revenge,” he is forced to spend two days in or near a bathroom. Beginning with a foreword “written” by Sitting Bull, and traveling from moose encounters in Minnesota to the Spanish Steps in Rome, this book reminds readers of the wisdom of elders, the cross-cultural confusion of Native-white encounters, and some of the most difficult issues faced by contemporary Native peoples. Falling somewhere between fact and fiction, the tales in Scalping Columbus and Other Stories combine outrageous comedy with clever social commentary, managing both to entertain and to enlighten.
50 Events That Shaped American Indian History [2 volumes]
Author: Donna Martinez
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1440835772
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 885
Book Description
This powerful two-volume set provides an insider's perspective on American Indian experiences through engaging narrative entries about key historical events written by leading scholars in American Indian history as well as inspiring first-person accounts from American Indian peoples. This comprehensive, two-volume resource on American Indian history covers events from the time of ancient Indian civilizations in North America to recent happenings in American Indian life in the 21st century, providing readers with an understanding of not only what happened to shape the American Indian experience but also how these events—some of which occurred long ago—continue to affect people's lives today. The first section of the book focuses on history in the pre-European contact period, documenting the tens of thousands of years that American Indians have resided on the continent in ancient civilizations, in contrast with the very short history of a few hundred years following contact with Europeans—during which time tremendous changes to American Indian culture occurred. The event coverage continues chronologically, addressing the early Colonial period and beginning of trade with Europeans and the consequential destruction of native economies, to the period of Western expansion and Indian removal in the 1800s, to events of forced assimilation and later self-determination in the 20th century and beyond. Readers will appreciate how American Indians continue to live rich cultural, social, and religious lives thanks to the activism of communities, organizations, and individuals, and perceive how their inspiring collective story of self-determination and sovereignty is far from over.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1440835772
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 885
Book Description
This powerful two-volume set provides an insider's perspective on American Indian experiences through engaging narrative entries about key historical events written by leading scholars in American Indian history as well as inspiring first-person accounts from American Indian peoples. This comprehensive, two-volume resource on American Indian history covers events from the time of ancient Indian civilizations in North America to recent happenings in American Indian life in the 21st century, providing readers with an understanding of not only what happened to shape the American Indian experience but also how these events—some of which occurred long ago—continue to affect people's lives today. The first section of the book focuses on history in the pre-European contact period, documenting the tens of thousands of years that American Indians have resided on the continent in ancient civilizations, in contrast with the very short history of a few hundred years following contact with Europeans—during which time tremendous changes to American Indian culture occurred. The event coverage continues chronologically, addressing the early Colonial period and beginning of trade with Europeans and the consequential destruction of native economies, to the period of Western expansion and Indian removal in the 1800s, to events of forced assimilation and later self-determination in the 20th century and beyond. Readers will appreciate how American Indians continue to live rich cultural, social, and religious lives thanks to the activism of communities, organizations, and individuals, and perceive how their inspiring collective story of self-determination and sovereignty is far from over.
Eye Killers
Author: A. A. Carr
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806172398
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353
Book Description
Lurking in the caves of eastern New Mexico, Falke, a thousand-year-old vampire, chooses his next bride: Melissa Roanhorse, an Albuquerque teenager. To regain his granddaughter’s life, Michael Roanhorse, an old Navajo sheepherder wise to the power of myth, must outwit the vampire and his loyal coven. So begins A.A. Carr’s Eye Killers, a novel that combines the Eastern European legend of the vampire with the Navajo tale of the monster slayer. The songs of Michael Roanhorse’s childhood include potent chants passed down through his grandmother, who sang to him of Changing Woman and her Warrior Twins, Monster Slayer and Child of the Water. But Michael’s spiritual strength and his memory have waned with the years. Who is left to help reunite him with his family and his family with their heritage? Michael enlists Diana Logan, Melissa’s young English teacher, to wrestle Melissa from the vampire. But to conquer Falke they must also overpower his coven: Elizabeth, captured by Falke in the 1850s during her family’s journey along the Santa Fe Trail, and Hanna, once a prostitute in Old Albuquerque, who aspires to supplant Falke’s vampire reign. Michael must invoke ancient traditions to bring Melissa home. The elders undertake to teach Diana, but her Irish-American heritage has not prepared her for a fight against shape-shifting vampires who have lived-and murdered-for centuries. In Eye Killers, Carr delivers an imaginative clash of cultures-both a suspenseful thriller and a valid rendering of Navajo and Pueblo tribal life in contemporary New Mexico. His inventiveness, expressed through melodic prose and layers of fine storytelling, weaves new legends of the American Southwest.
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806172398
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353
Book Description
Lurking in the caves of eastern New Mexico, Falke, a thousand-year-old vampire, chooses his next bride: Melissa Roanhorse, an Albuquerque teenager. To regain his granddaughter’s life, Michael Roanhorse, an old Navajo sheepherder wise to the power of myth, must outwit the vampire and his loyal coven. So begins A.A. Carr’s Eye Killers, a novel that combines the Eastern European legend of the vampire with the Navajo tale of the monster slayer. The songs of Michael Roanhorse’s childhood include potent chants passed down through his grandmother, who sang to him of Changing Woman and her Warrior Twins, Monster Slayer and Child of the Water. But Michael’s spiritual strength and his memory have waned with the years. Who is left to help reunite him with his family and his family with their heritage? Michael enlists Diana Logan, Melissa’s young English teacher, to wrestle Melissa from the vampire. But to conquer Falke they must also overpower his coven: Elizabeth, captured by Falke in the 1850s during her family’s journey along the Santa Fe Trail, and Hanna, once a prostitute in Old Albuquerque, who aspires to supplant Falke’s vampire reign. Michael must invoke ancient traditions to bring Melissa home. The elders undertake to teach Diana, but her Irish-American heritage has not prepared her for a fight against shape-shifting vampires who have lived-and murdered-for centuries. In Eye Killers, Carr delivers an imaginative clash of cultures-both a suspenseful thriller and a valid rendering of Navajo and Pueblo tribal life in contemporary New Mexico. His inventiveness, expressed through melodic prose and layers of fine storytelling, weaves new legends of the American Southwest.
Rethinking Columbus
Author: Bill Bigelow
Publisher: Rethinking Schools
ISBN: 094296120X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 197
Book Description
Provides resources for teaching elementary and secondary school students about Christopher Columbus and the discovery of America.
Publisher: Rethinking Schools
ISBN: 094296120X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 197
Book Description
Provides resources for teaching elementary and secondary school students about Christopher Columbus and the discovery of America.
Empire of the Summer Moon
Author: S. C. Gwynne
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416597158
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394
Book Description
*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award* *A New York Times Notable Book* *Winner of the Texas Book Award and the Oklahoma Book Award* This New York Times bestseller and stunning historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West “is nothing short of a revelation…will leave dust and blood on your jeans” (The New York Times Book Review). Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second entails one of the most remarkable narratives ever to come out of the Old West: the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son Quanah, who became the last and greatest chief of the Comanches. Although readers may be more familiar with the tribal names Apache and Sioux, it was in fact the legendary fighting ability of the Comanches that determined when the American West opened up. Comanche boys became adept bareback riders by age six; full Comanche braves were considered the best horsemen who ever rode. They were so masterful at war and so skillful with their arrows and lances that they stopped the northern drive of colonial Spain from Mexico and halted the French expansion westward from Louisiana. White settlers arriving in Texas from the eastern United States were surprised to find the frontier being rolled backward by Comanches incensed by the invasion of their tribal lands. The war with the Comanches lasted four decades, in effect holding up the development of the new American nation. Gwynne’s exhilarating account delivers a sweeping narrative that encompasses Spanish colonialism, the Civil War, the destruction of the buffalo herds, and the arrival of the railroads, and the amazing story of Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah—a historical feast for anyone interested in how the United States came into being. Hailed by critics, S. C. Gwynne’s account of these events is meticulously researched, intellectually provocative, and, above all, thrillingly told. Empire of the Summer Moon announces him as a major new writer of American history.
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416597158
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394
Book Description
*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award* *A New York Times Notable Book* *Winner of the Texas Book Award and the Oklahoma Book Award* This New York Times bestseller and stunning historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West “is nothing short of a revelation…will leave dust and blood on your jeans” (The New York Times Book Review). Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second entails one of the most remarkable narratives ever to come out of the Old West: the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son Quanah, who became the last and greatest chief of the Comanches. Although readers may be more familiar with the tribal names Apache and Sioux, it was in fact the legendary fighting ability of the Comanches that determined when the American West opened up. Comanche boys became adept bareback riders by age six; full Comanche braves were considered the best horsemen who ever rode. They were so masterful at war and so skillful with their arrows and lances that they stopped the northern drive of colonial Spain from Mexico and halted the French expansion westward from Louisiana. White settlers arriving in Texas from the eastern United States were surprised to find the frontier being rolled backward by Comanches incensed by the invasion of their tribal lands. The war with the Comanches lasted four decades, in effect holding up the development of the new American nation. Gwynne’s exhilarating account delivers a sweeping narrative that encompasses Spanish colonialism, the Civil War, the destruction of the buffalo herds, and the arrival of the railroads, and the amazing story of Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah—a historical feast for anyone interested in how the United States came into being. Hailed by critics, S. C. Gwynne’s account of these events is meticulously researched, intellectually provocative, and, above all, thrillingly told. Empire of the Summer Moon announces him as a major new writer of American history.
Myths of the Cherokee
Author: James Mooney
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486131327
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 610
Book Description
126 myths: sacred stories, animal myths, local legends, many more. Plus background on Cherokee history, notes on the myths and parallels. Features 20 maps and illustrations.
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486131327
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 610
Book Description
126 myths: sacred stories, animal myths, local legends, many more. Plus background on Cherokee history, notes on the myths and parallels. Features 20 maps and illustrations.
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (10th Anniversary Edition)
Author: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807013145
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330
Book Description
New York Times Bestseller Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck Recipient of the American Book Award The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.” Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807013145
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330
Book Description
New York Times Bestseller Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck Recipient of the American Book Award The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.” Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.
American Military History Volume 1
Author: Army Center of Military History
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781944961404
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436
Book Description
American Military History provides the United States Army-in particular, its young officers, NCOs, and cadets-with a comprehensive but brief account of its past. The Center of Military History first published this work in 1956 as a textbook for senior ROTC courses. Since then it has gone through a number of updates and revisions, but the primary intent has remained the same. Support for military history education has always been a principal mission of the Center, and this new edition of an invaluable history furthers that purpose. The history of an active organization tends to expand rapidly as the organization grows larger and more complex. The period since the Vietnam War, at which point the most recent edition ended, has been a significant one for the Army, a busy period of expanding roles and missions and of fundamental organizational changes. In particular, the explosion of missions and deployments since 11 September 2001 has necessitated the creation of additional, open-ended chapters in the story of the U.S. Army in action. This first volume covers the Army's history from its birth in 1775 to the eve of World War I. By 1917, the United States was already a world power. The Army had sent large expeditionary forces beyond the American hemisphere, and at the beginning of the new century Secretary of War Elihu Root had proposed changes and reforms that within a generation would shape the Army of the future. But world war-global war-was still to come. The second volume of this new edition will take up that story and extend it into the twenty-first century and the early years of the war on terrorism and includes an analysis of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq up to January 2009.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781944961404
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436
Book Description
American Military History provides the United States Army-in particular, its young officers, NCOs, and cadets-with a comprehensive but brief account of its past. The Center of Military History first published this work in 1956 as a textbook for senior ROTC courses. Since then it has gone through a number of updates and revisions, but the primary intent has remained the same. Support for military history education has always been a principal mission of the Center, and this new edition of an invaluable history furthers that purpose. The history of an active organization tends to expand rapidly as the organization grows larger and more complex. The period since the Vietnam War, at which point the most recent edition ended, has been a significant one for the Army, a busy period of expanding roles and missions and of fundamental organizational changes. In particular, the explosion of missions and deployments since 11 September 2001 has necessitated the creation of additional, open-ended chapters in the story of the U.S. Army in action. This first volume covers the Army's history from its birth in 1775 to the eve of World War I. By 1917, the United States was already a world power. The Army had sent large expeditionary forces beyond the American hemisphere, and at the beginning of the new century Secretary of War Elihu Root had proposed changes and reforms that within a generation would shape the Army of the future. But world war-global war-was still to come. The second volume of this new edition will take up that story and extend it into the twenty-first century and the early years of the war on terrorism and includes an analysis of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq up to January 2009.
Pipestone
Author: Adam Fortunate Eagle
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806184256
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 214
Book Description
A renowned activist recalls his childhood years in an Indian boarding school Best known as a leader of the Indian takeover of Alcatraz Island in 1969, Adam Fortunate Eagle now offers an unforgettable memoir of his years as a young student at Pipestone Indian Boarding School in Minnesota. In this rare firsthand account, Fortunate Eagle lives up to his reputation as a “contrary warrior” by disproving the popular view of Indian boarding schools as bleak and prisonlike. Fortunate Eagle attended Pipestone between 1935 and 1945, just as Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier’s pluralist vision was reshaping the federal boarding school system to promote greater respect for Native cultures and traditions. But this book is hardly a dry history of the late boarding school era. Telling this story in the voice of his younger self, the author takes us on a delightful journey into his childhood and the inner world of the boarding school. Along the way, he shares anecdotes of dormitory culture, student pranks, and warrior games. Although Fortunate Eagle recognizes Pipestone’s shortcomings, he describes his time there as nothing less than “a little bit of heaven.” Were all Indian boarding schools the dispiriting places that history has suggested? This book allows readers to decide for themselves.
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806184256
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 214
Book Description
A renowned activist recalls his childhood years in an Indian boarding school Best known as a leader of the Indian takeover of Alcatraz Island in 1969, Adam Fortunate Eagle now offers an unforgettable memoir of his years as a young student at Pipestone Indian Boarding School in Minnesota. In this rare firsthand account, Fortunate Eagle lives up to his reputation as a “contrary warrior” by disproving the popular view of Indian boarding schools as bleak and prisonlike. Fortunate Eagle attended Pipestone between 1935 and 1945, just as Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier’s pluralist vision was reshaping the federal boarding school system to promote greater respect for Native cultures and traditions. But this book is hardly a dry history of the late boarding school era. Telling this story in the voice of his younger self, the author takes us on a delightful journey into his childhood and the inner world of the boarding school. Along the way, he shares anecdotes of dormitory culture, student pranks, and warrior games. Although Fortunate Eagle recognizes Pipestone’s shortcomings, he describes his time there as nothing less than “a little bit of heaven.” Were all Indian boarding schools the dispiriting places that history has suggested? This book allows readers to decide for themselves.
740 Park
Author: Michael Gross
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0767917448
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 580
Book Description
From the author of House of Outrageous Fortune For seventy-five years, it’s been Manhattan’s richest apartment building, and one of the most lusted-after addresses in the world. One apartment had 37 rooms, 14 bathrooms, 43 closets, 11 working fireplaces, a private elevator, and his-and-hers saunas; another at one time had a live-in service staff of 16. To this day, it is steeped in the purest luxury, the kind most of us could only imagine, until now. The last great building to go up along New York’s Gold Coast, construction on 740 Park finished in 1930. Since then, 740 has been home to an ever-evolving cadre of our wealthiest and most powerful families, some of America’s (and the world’s) oldest money—the kind attached to names like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Bouvier, Chrysler, Niarchos, Houghton, and Harkness—and some whose names evoke the excesses of today’s monied elite: Kravis, Koch, Bronfman, Perelman, Steinberg, and Schwarzman. All along, the building has housed titans of industry, political power brokers, international royalty, fabulous scam-artists, and even the lowest scoundrels. The book begins with the tumultuous story of the building’s construction. Conceived in the bubbling financial, artistic, and social cauldron of 1920’s Manhattan, 740 Park rose to its dizzying heights as the stock market plunged in 1929—the building was in dire financial straits before the first apartments were sold. The builders include the architectural genius Rosario Candela, the scheming businessman James T. Lee (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s grandfather), and a raft of financiers, many of whom were little more than white-collar crooks and grand-scale hustlers. Once finished, 740 became a magnet for the richest, oldest families in the country: the Brewsters, descendents of the leader of the Plymouth Colony; the socially-registered Bordens, Hoppins, Scovilles, Thornes, and Schermerhorns; and top executives of the Chase Bank, American Express, and U.S. Rubber. Outside the walls of 740 Park, these were the people shaping America culturally and economically. Within those walls, they were indulging in all of the Seven Deadly Sins. As the social climate evolved throughout the last century, so did 740 Park: after World War II, the building’s rulers eased their more restrictive policies and began allowing Jews (though not to this day African Americans) to reside within their hallowed walls. Nowadays, it is full to bursting with new money, people whose fortunes, though freshly-made, are large enough to buy their way in. At its core this book is a social history of the American rich, and how the locus of power and influence has shifted haltingly from old bloodlines to new money. But it’s also much more than that: filled with meaty, startling, often tragic stories of the people who lived behind 740’s walls, the book gives us an unprecedented access to worlds of wealth, privilege, and extraordinary folly that are usually hidden behind a scrim of money and influence. This is, truly, how the other half—or at least the other one hundredth of one percent—lives.
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0767917448
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 580
Book Description
From the author of House of Outrageous Fortune For seventy-five years, it’s been Manhattan’s richest apartment building, and one of the most lusted-after addresses in the world. One apartment had 37 rooms, 14 bathrooms, 43 closets, 11 working fireplaces, a private elevator, and his-and-hers saunas; another at one time had a live-in service staff of 16. To this day, it is steeped in the purest luxury, the kind most of us could only imagine, until now. The last great building to go up along New York’s Gold Coast, construction on 740 Park finished in 1930. Since then, 740 has been home to an ever-evolving cadre of our wealthiest and most powerful families, some of America’s (and the world’s) oldest money—the kind attached to names like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Bouvier, Chrysler, Niarchos, Houghton, and Harkness—and some whose names evoke the excesses of today’s monied elite: Kravis, Koch, Bronfman, Perelman, Steinberg, and Schwarzman. All along, the building has housed titans of industry, political power brokers, international royalty, fabulous scam-artists, and even the lowest scoundrels. The book begins with the tumultuous story of the building’s construction. Conceived in the bubbling financial, artistic, and social cauldron of 1920’s Manhattan, 740 Park rose to its dizzying heights as the stock market plunged in 1929—the building was in dire financial straits before the first apartments were sold. The builders include the architectural genius Rosario Candela, the scheming businessman James T. Lee (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s grandfather), and a raft of financiers, many of whom were little more than white-collar crooks and grand-scale hustlers. Once finished, 740 became a magnet for the richest, oldest families in the country: the Brewsters, descendents of the leader of the Plymouth Colony; the socially-registered Bordens, Hoppins, Scovilles, Thornes, and Schermerhorns; and top executives of the Chase Bank, American Express, and U.S. Rubber. Outside the walls of 740 Park, these were the people shaping America culturally and economically. Within those walls, they were indulging in all of the Seven Deadly Sins. As the social climate evolved throughout the last century, so did 740 Park: after World War II, the building’s rulers eased their more restrictive policies and began allowing Jews (though not to this day African Americans) to reside within their hallowed walls. Nowadays, it is full to bursting with new money, people whose fortunes, though freshly-made, are large enough to buy their way in. At its core this book is a social history of the American rich, and how the locus of power and influence has shifted haltingly from old bloodlines to new money. But it’s also much more than that: filled with meaty, startling, often tragic stories of the people who lived behind 740’s walls, the book gives us an unprecedented access to worlds of wealth, privilege, and extraordinary folly that are usually hidden behind a scrim of money and influence. This is, truly, how the other half—or at least the other one hundredth of one percent—lives.