The Underground Railroad: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, &c., Narrating the Hardships, Hair-Breadth Escapes and Death Struggles of ... & Others or Witnessed by the Author by Benediction Books $34.99
William Still’s encyclopaedic collection of slave narratives.

New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009 (Modern Library) by Teresa Carpenter $26.00
New York is a city like no other. Through the centuries, she’s been embraced and reviled, worshipped and feared, praised and battered—all the while standing at the crossroads of American politics, business, society, and culture. Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author Teresa Carpenter, a lifelong diary enthusiast, scoured the archives of libraries, historical societies,...

The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars by Crown $26.00
“No writer better articulates ourinterest in the confluence of hope, eccentricity, and the timelessness of the bold and strange than Paul Collins.”—DAVE EGGERS On Long Island, a farmer finds a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discover a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumble upon neatly...

The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Penguin (Non-Classics) $16.00
A beguiling concoction-equal parts true crime, twentieth-century history, and science thriller. A fascinating Jazz Age tale of chemistry and detection, poison and murder, The Poisoner's Handbook is a page-turning account of a forgotten era. In early twentieth-century New York, poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime. Science had no place in the Tammany Hall-controlled coroner's office,...

The Johnstown Flood by Simon & Schuster $16.00
At the end of the last century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hardworking families striving for a piece of the nation's burgeoning industrial prosperity. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity, among them Andrew...

Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires by St. Martin's Griffin $19.99
For half a century, the American Mafia outwitted, outmaneuvered, and outgunned the FBI and other police agencies, wreaking unparalleled damages to America's social fabric and business enterprises while emerging as the nation's most formidable crime empire.  The vanguard of this criminal juggernaut is still led by the Mafia's most potent and largest borgatas: New York's Five Families.Five...

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by Simon & Schuster $35.00
Published on the fortieth anniversary of its initial publication, this edition of the classic book contains a new Preface by David McCullough, “one of our most gifted living writers” (The Washington Post).Built to join the rapidly expanding cities of New York and Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Bridge was thought by many at the start to be an impossibility destined to fail if not from insurmountable...

The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America by Vintage $16.00
When the British wrested New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664, the truth about its thriving, polyglot society began to disappear into myths about an island purchased for 24 dollars and a cartoonish peg-legged governor. But the story of the Dutch colony of New Netherland was merely lost, not destroyed: 12,000 pages of its records–recently declared a national treasure–are now being translated. ...

Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City by Terence Winter $16.95
Providing the inspiration and source material for the upcoming HBO series produced by Academy Award–winning director Martin Scorsese and Emmy Award–winning screenwriter Terence Winter, this riveting and wide-reaching history explores the sordid past of Atlantic City—forever a freewheeling town long-dedicated to the fast buck—from the city's heyday as a Prohibition-era mecca of lawlessness to...

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever by Faber & Faber $30.00
Punk rock and hip-hop. Disco and salsa. The loft jazz scene and the downtown composers known as Minimalists. In the mid-1970s, New York City was a laboratory where all the major styles of modern music were reinvented—all at once, from one block to the next, by musicians who knew, admired, and borrowed from one another. Crime was everywhere, the government was broke, and the city’s...