When the Astors Owned New York

When the Astors Owned New York PDF Author: Justin Kaplan
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101218819
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
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

When the Astors Owned New York

When the Astors Owned New York PDF Author: Justin Kaplan
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101218819
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
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

The Astors

The Astors PDF Author: Virginia Cowles
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781911445425
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book Here

Book Description
"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."--

The Second Mrs. Astor

The Second Mrs. Astor PDF Author: Shana Abe
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corporation
ISBN: 1496732049
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

John Jacob Astor

John Jacob Astor PDF Author: John Denis Haeger
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814343430
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Astors

The Astors PDF Author: Lucy Kavaler
Publisher: Toronto, Harrap
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Astor Orphan

The Astor Orphan PDF Author: Alexandra Aldrich
Publisher: Ecco
ISBN: 9780062207951
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Mrs. Astor's New York

Mrs. Astor's New York PDF Author: Eric Homberger
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300105155
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Astoria

Astoria PDF Author: Peter Stark
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 006221831X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Astor Family

The Astor Family PDF Author: John D. Gates
Publisher: Doubleday Books
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

John Jacob Astor

John Jacob Astor PDF Author: Axel Madsen
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0471009350
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book Here

Book Description
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