Who Killed Jane Stanford?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University

Who Killed Jane Stanford?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University PDF Author: Richard White
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324004347
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
Named One of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 by the Los Angeles Times A premier historian penetrates the fog of corruption and cover-up still surrounding the murder of a Stanford University founder to establish who did it, how, and why. In 1885 Jane and Leland Stanford cofounded a university to honor their recently deceased young son. After her husband’s death in 1893, Jane Stanford, a devoted spiritualist who expected the university to inculcate her values, steered Stanford into eccentricity and public controversy for more than a decade. In 1905 she was murdered in Hawaii, a victim, according to the Honolulu coroner’s jury, of strychnine poisoning. With her vast fortune the university’s lifeline, the Stanford president and his allies quickly sought to foreclose challenges to her bequests by constructing a story of death by natural causes. The cover-up gained traction in the murky labyrinths of power, wealth, and corruption of Gilded Age San Francisco. The murderer walked. Deftly sifting the scattered evidence and conflicting stories of suspects and witnesses, Richard White gives us the first full account of Jane Stanford’s murder and its cover-up. Against a backdrop of the city’s machine politics, rogue policing, tong wars, and heated newspaper rivalries, White’s search for the murderer draws us into Jane Stanford’s imperious household and the academic enmities of the university. Although Stanford officials claimed that no one could have wanted to murder Jane, we meet several people who had the motives and the opportunity to do so. One of these, we discover, also had the means.

Who Killed Jane Stanford?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University

Who Killed Jane Stanford?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University PDF Author: Richard White
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324004347
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394

Get Book Here

Book Description
Named One of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 by the Los Angeles Times A premier historian penetrates the fog of corruption and cover-up still surrounding the murder of a Stanford University founder to establish who did it, how, and why. In 1885 Jane and Leland Stanford cofounded a university to honor their recently deceased young son. After her husband’s death in 1893, Jane Stanford, a devoted spiritualist who expected the university to inculcate her values, steered Stanford into eccentricity and public controversy for more than a decade. In 1905 she was murdered in Hawaii, a victim, according to the Honolulu coroner’s jury, of strychnine poisoning. With her vast fortune the university’s lifeline, the Stanford president and his allies quickly sought to foreclose challenges to her bequests by constructing a story of death by natural causes. The cover-up gained traction in the murky labyrinths of power, wealth, and corruption of Gilded Age San Francisco. The murderer walked. Deftly sifting the scattered evidence and conflicting stories of suspects and witnesses, Richard White gives us the first full account of Jane Stanford’s murder and its cover-up. Against a backdrop of the city’s machine politics, rogue policing, tong wars, and heated newspaper rivalries, White’s search for the murderer draws us into Jane Stanford’s imperious household and the academic enmities of the university. Although Stanford officials claimed that no one could have wanted to murder Jane, we meet several people who had the motives and the opportunity to do so. One of these, we discover, also had the means.

The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford

The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford PDF Author: Robert W. P. Cutler
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804747936
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Jane Stanford, the co-founder of Stanford University, died in Honolulu in 1905, shortly after surviving strychnine poisoning in San Francisco. The inquest testimony of the physicians who attended her death in Hawaii led to a coroner’s jury verdict of murder—by strychnine poisoning. Stanford University President David Starr Jordan promptly issued a press release claiming that Mrs. Stanford had died of heart disease, a claim that he supported by challenging the skills and judgment of the Honolulu physicians and toxicologist. Jordan’s diagnosis was largely accepted and promulgated in many subsequent historical accounts. In this book, the author reviews the medical reports in detail to refute Dr. Jordan’s claim and to show that Mrs. Stanford indeed died of strychnine poisoning. His research reveals that the professionals who were denounced by Dr. Jordan enjoyed honorable and distinguished careers. He concludes that Dr. Jordan went to great lengths, over a period of nearly two decades, to cover up the real circumstances of Mrs. Stanford’s death.

Why Fish Don't Exist

Why Fish Don't Exist PDF Author: Lulu Miller
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501160346
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Nineteenth-century scientist David Starr Jordan built one of the most important fish specimen collections ever seen, until the 1906 San Francisco earthquake shattered his life's work.

American Disruptor

American Disruptor PDF Author: Roland De Wolk
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520383230
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
The rags-to-riches story of Silicon Valley's original disruptor. American Disruptor is the untold story of Leland Stanford – from his birth in a backwoods bar to the founding of the world-class university that became and remains the nucleus of Silicon Valley. The life of this robber baron, politician, and historic influencer is the astonishing tale of how one supremely ambitious man became this country's original "disruptor" – reshaping industry and engineering one of the greatest raids on the public treasury for America’s transcontinental railroad, all while living more opulently than maharajas, kings, and emperors. It is also the saga of how Stanford, once a serial failure, overcame all obstacles to become one of America’s most powerful and wealthiest men, using his high elective office to enrich himself before losing the one thing that mattered most to him—his only child and son. Scandal and intrigue would follow Stanford through his life, and even after his death, when his widow was murdered in a Honolulu hotel—a crime quickly covered up by the almost stillborn university she had saved. Richly detailed and deeply researched, American Disruptor restores Leland Stanford’s rightful place as a revolutionary force and architect of modern America.

Deer Creek Drive

Deer Creek Drive PDF Author: Beverly Lowry
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1984898361
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
The stunning true story of a murder that rocked the Mississippi Delta and forever shaped one author’s life and perception of home. “Mix together a bloody murder in a privileged white family, a false accusation against a Black man, a suspicious town, a sensational trial with colorful lawyers, and a punishment that didn’t fit the crime, and you have the best of southern gothic fiction. But the very best part is that the story is true.” —John Grisham In 1948, in the most stubbornly Dixiefied corner of the Jim Crow south, society matron Idella Thompson was viciously murdered in her own home: stabbed at least 150 times and left facedown in one of the bathrooms. Her daughter, Ruth Dickins, was the only other person in the house. She told authorities a Black man she didn’t recognize had fled the scene, but no evidence of the man's presence was uncovered. When Dickins herself was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, the community exploded. Petitions pleading for her release were drafted, signed, and circulated, and after only six years, the governor of Mississippi granted Ruth Dickins an indefinite suspension of her sentence and she was set free. In Deer Creek Drive, Beverly Lowry—who was ten at the time of the murder and lived mere miles from the Thompsons’ home—tells a story of white privilege that still has ramifications today, and reflects on the brutal crime, its aftermath, and the ways it clarified her own upbringing in Mississippi.

Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History

Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History PDF Author: Steven J. Zipperstein
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631492705
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award (History) Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Economist and the East Hampton Star Shortlisted for the Mark Lynton History Prize Separating historical fact from fantasy, an acclaimed historian retells the story of Kishinev, a riot that transformed the course of twentieth-century Jewish history. So shattering were the aftereffects of Kishinev, the rampage that broke out in late-Tsarist Russia in April 1903, that one historian remarked that it was “nothing less than a prototype for the Holocaust itself.” In three days of violence, 49 Jews were killed and 600 raped or wounded, while more than 1,000 Jewish-owned houses and stores were ransacked and destroyed. Recounted in lurid detail by newspapers throughout the Western world, and covered sensationally by America’s Hearst press, the pre-Easter attacks seized the imagination of an international public, quickly becoming the prototype for what would become known as a “pogrom,” and providing the impetus for efforts as varied as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the NAACP. Using new evidence culled from Russia, Israel, and Europe, distinguished historian Steven J. Zipperstein’s wide-ranging book brings historical insight and clarity to a much-misunderstood event that would do so much to transform twentieth-century Jewish life and beyond.

The Inventor and the Tycoon

The Inventor and the Tycoon PDF Author: Edward Ball
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0767929403
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A Chicago Tribune Noteworthy Book of the Year Nearly 140 years ago, in frontier California, photographer Eadweard Muybridge captured time with his camera and played it back on a flickering screen, inventing the breakthrough technology of moving pictures. Yet the visionary inventor Muybridge was also a murderer who killed coolly and meticulously, and his trial became a national sensation. Despite Muybridge’s crime, the artist’s patron, railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University, hired the photographer to answer the question of whether the four hooves of a running horse ever left the ground all at once—and together these two unlikely men launched the age of visual media. Written with style and passion by National Book Award-winner Edward Ball, this riveting true-crime tale of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads puts on display the virtues and vices of the great American West.

Introduction to Information Retrieval

Introduction to Information Retrieval PDF Author: Christopher D. Manning
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139472100
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Class-tested and coherent, this textbook teaches classical and web information retrieval, including web search and the related areas of text classification and text clustering from basic concepts. It gives an up-to-date treatment of all aspects of the design and implementation of systems for gathering, indexing, and searching documents; methods for evaluating systems; and an introduction to the use of machine learning methods on text collections. All the important ideas are explained using examples and figures, making it perfect for introductory courses in information retrieval for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in computer science. Based on feedback from extensive classroom experience, the book has been carefully structured in order to make teaching more natural and effective. Slides and additional exercises (with solutions for lecturers) are also available through the book's supporting website to help course instructors prepare their lectures.

Defending Battered Women on Trial

Defending Battered Women on Trial PDF Author: Elizabeth A. Sheehy
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774826541
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 493

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Book Description
In the landmark Lavallee decision of 1990, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that evidence of “battered woman syndrome” was admissible in establishing self-defence for women accused of killing their abusive partners. This book looks at the legal response to battered women who killed their partners in the fifteen years since Lavallee. Elizabeth Sheehy uses trial transcripts and a case study approach to tell the stories of eleven women, ten of whom killed their partners. She looks at the barriers women face to “just leaving,” the various ways in which self-defence was argued in these cases, and which form of expert testimony was used to frame women’s experience of battering. Drawing upon a rich expanse of research from many disciplines, she highlights the limitations of the law of self-defence and the costs to women undergoing a murder trial. In a final chapter, she proposes numerous reforms. In Canada, a woman is killed every six days by her male partner, and about twelve women per year kill their male partners. By illuminating the cases of eleven women, this book highlights the barriers to leaving violent men and the practical and legal dilemmas that face battered women on trial for murder.

How to Make Love to a Despot: An Alternative Foreign Policy for the Twenty-First Century

How to Make Love to a Despot: An Alternative Foreign Policy for the Twenty-First Century PDF Author: Stephen D. Krasner
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631496603
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
After generations of foreign policy failures, the United States can finally try to make the world safer—not by relying on utopian goals but by working pragmatically with nondemocracies. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has sunk hundreds of billions of dollars into foreign economies in the hope that its investments would help remake the world in its own image—or, at the very least, make the world “safe for democracy.” So far, the returns have been disappointing, to say the least. Pushing for fair and free elections in undemocratic countries has added to the casualty count, rather than taken away from it, and trying to eliminate corruption entirely has precluded the elimination of some of the worst forms of corruption. In the Middle East, for example, post-9/11 interventionist campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have proved to be long, costly, and, worst of all, ineffective. Witnessing the failure of the utopian vision of a world full of market-oriented democracies, many observers, both on the right and the left, have begun to embrace a dystopian vision in which the United States can do nothing and save no one. Accordingly, calls to halt all assistance in undemocratic countries have grown louder. But, as Stephen D. Krasner explains, this cannot be an option: weak and poorly governed states pose a threat to our stability. In the era of nuclear weapons and biological warfare, ignoring troubled countries puts millions of American lives at risk. “The greatest challenge for the United States now,” Krasner writes, “is to identify a set of policies that lie between the utopian vision that all countries can be like the United States . . . and the dystopian view that nothing can be done.” He prescribes a pragmatic new course of policy. Drawing on decades of research, he makes the case for “good enough governance”—governance that aims for better security, better health, limited economic growth, and some protection of human rights. To this end, Krasner proposes working with despots to promote growth. In a world where a single terrorist can kill thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people, the United States does not have the luxury of idealistically ignoring the rest of the world. But it cannot remake the world in its own image either. Instead, it must learn how to make love to despots.