This is a fairly comprehensive look at drinking establishments from before the Revolution through Prohibition and up to the more recent past. The author had a little fun with the book and chapter titles. The chapters track the bar’s evolution: from A Pilgrim Walks into a Bar, to A Crusader Walks into a Bar, and Read More
Category: Nonfiction
Plentiful Country, by Tyler Anbinder
This book works to disprove the long accepted idea that the Irish who came to America fleeing the Potato Famine arrived as unskilled labor, and remained at the lowest rungs of society for the rest of their lives. Anbinder, with help from a number of assistants, undertook a ten year study, and this book is Read More
Hell on Wheels, by Dick Kreck
Apparently, the title is the phrase people used to describe the towns that popped up along the route of construction of the Union Pacific Railroad in the late 1860’s. This was due to the high proportion of individuals in these towns whose main goal was to separate railroad construction workers from their pay. Some of Read More
Brought Forth on This Continent, by Harold Holzer
This is a Lincoln biography, but with a specific focus. The subtitle of the book is “Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration”. Most of the biographies of Lincoln that I have read, and I certainly have not read them all, focus mainly on his early years, and then the years in the White House in the Read More
National Pastime, by Martin C Babicz & Thomas W Zeiler
The subtitle of this book is, “U.S. History Through Baseball”. And that is indeed what this book describes. Each chapter starts with a few paragraphs about a short period of U. S. history, and the rest of the chapter talks about baseball history during that same time span. I had not realized it before, but Read More
A Short History of the Railroad, by Christian Wolmar
I had thought that this book would cover the history of the American railroad system, and it does. However, it also covers the history of railroad systems around the world. So, the level of information is in some cases very broad, but not terribly deep. Having said that, I did learn a couple of things Read More
American Aristocrats, by Harry S Stout
The author tracks the Anderson family, starting with the patriarch, Richard Clough Anderson, through the next two generations. This was made easier by two things – there is a lot of correspondence between the family members, and a few other individuals, that is still extant, and this family was acquainted with, or was distantly related Read More
The Cause, by Joseph J Ellis
The subtitle is “The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783”. This book is somewhat of an overview of some of the people involved in the Revolution, without going into too much detail about specific battles. This author discusses the major players in the time period instead. He spends much of the book, understandably, on George Read More
The Santa Claus Man, by Alex Palmer
The title makes this sound like a cheerful Yuletide story, but the holiday is not the focus of this book. The focus is a man called John Duval Gluck, who started out trying to make sure poor New York City children had at least one gift for Christmas, but at some point, his goals shifted. Read More
Home Fires, by Sean Patrick Adams
The subtitle of this “How Things Worked” book is How Americans Kept Warm in the Nineteenth Century. The author starts by discussing how even before the American Revolution, in the larger East Coast cities, wintertime could bring a shortage of fire wood. The heating method, and cooking method, at the time was a hearth using Read More