Books by Jill Jonnes
Eiffel's Tower:And the World's Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris,
the Artists Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count
When self-made millionaire and engineer Gustave Eiffel won a contest to erect a colossal tower as the spectacular centerpiece of the 1889 Exposition Universelle, Parisian tastemakers were outraged. They denounced Eiffel’s proposed thousand-foot tower as a “hideous” blot on their historic city, even as fearful residents brought lawsuits amid predictions of certain structural calamity. Read more… |
 |
Conquering Gotham:Building Penn Station and Its Tunnels
As the nineteenth century ends, Pennsylvania Railroad president Alexander Cassatt seeks some way-other than huge fleets of ferries from New Jersey-to bring the PRR's tens of millions of passengers into water-locked Gotham. By 1901, the brilliant Cassatt has embarked upon a course so ambitious, so visionary, it is denounced as corporate folly. Under his direction, the PRR will build a monumental system of electrified tunnels under the Hudson River, Manhattan, and the East River to Long Island, capping them all with the crown jewel of Pennsylvania Station. Read more… |
|
Empires of Light:Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World
In the final decades of the nineteenth century, three brilliant and visionary titans of America's Gilded Age, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse, battled bitterly as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In Empires of Light, historian Jill Jonnes portrays this extraordinary trio and their riveting and ruthless world of cutting-edge science, invention, intrigue, money, death, and hard-eyed Wall Street millionaires. Read more… |
|
Hep-cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams:A History of America's Romance with Illegal Drugs
Once upon a time in America, morphine and cocaine were routinely sold in pharmacies, and hop-heads gathered in shadowy basements to smoke opium. So begins Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams, Jill Jonnes's ground-breaking history of illegal drugs in America. Jonnes vividly traces our first turn-of-the-century drug epidemic, successfully quelled, and then follows the story into the post-war era: starting in the jazz world of the northern cities and moving though the flower power 1960's to the cocaine and crack explosions of the 1980's and 1990's. Read more… |
|
South Bronx Rising:The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City
The book tells the colorful story of the borough's development as a New York suburb and boomtown with the influx of hundreds of thousands of German, Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants, which became a major base of political power for Franklin D. Roosevelt and his powerful lieutenant, Boss Ed Flynn. After World War II, the Bronx underwent its second boom, beginning with immigrants from Puerto Rico and African Americans from Manhattan. On their heels came the camp followers of modern urban poverty: drug dealers, real estate pirates, arsonists. Read more… |
|
|
