America's Secret Aristocracy offers an inside look at the estates, marriages and financial empires of America's most selective club and a gallery of vivid portrait of its members.

The Grandes Damesof America knew just what they wanted and precisely how to get it, and when faced with criticism, malice or jealousy, they would rise above their detractors and usually persevere. Preeminent social historian Stephen Birmingham takes us into the drawing rooms of these powerful women, providing keen insights into aspects of an American Society that no longer exists."

Stephen Birmingham explores here the fascinating social history of California, showing how the ruling class of California was born from rough hewn mining communities, and how it evolved a lifestyle that continues to fascinate the world.

In this chatty, anecdotal, and often ironic inquiry, Stephen Birmingham investigates the nesting habits, enjoyments, and frustrations of American suburban life in the Seventies.

Life at the Dakota is a deliciously entertaining social history which describes the lives of the rich and trendy who have lived at the Dakota, a New York apartment house daringly erected in 1884, "too far up" and on the wrong side of town. In Stephen Birmingham's witty chronicle, the atmosphere of this elegant edifice is so powerful that the building itself becomes an unforgettable major character. From its start the Dakota has attracted a lively mix of people, from celebrities Leonard Bernstein, Roberta Flack, and John Lennon, to a ground-floor tenant who kept a stuffed horse in full armor...

Here, in this engrossing and often hilarious book, Stephen Birmingham explores how the Irish elite emerged in America-frequently in less than a generation's time-out of poverty into positions of both social and business prominence.

Where are the Right Places, those exclusive locations where the privileged live and play? You may be in for a surprise. For as Stephen Birmingham shows, in the same witty, penetrating style that characterized his other studies of the elite, the Right Places could be just about anywhere, from exclusive chalets in Sun Valley, Idaho to the traditionally swank estates of Fairfield County, Connecticut, to the nascent avant-garde art scene in Kansas City, Missouri. Birmingham goes to great lengths to unveil the secret enclaves of the rich for his readers, from the secret hideaway of Maria Callas...

The Right People is an engrossing and illuminating journey through the customs and habits of the phenomenally wealthy, from the San Francisco elite to the upper crust of New York's Westchester County.

Tracing their origins to medieval Portugal and Spain, the Sephardic Jews consider themselves 'the nobility of Jewry, ' in contrast to their pushier and more aggressive German counterparts. They were also the first Jews to inhabit the new world--first exiled from Spain and Portugal, and then forced out of Brazil, a ship bearing 23 Sephardic Jews was blown off its course to Holland, beset by pirates, and then captured by a French captain before being ransomed for the 'payment of their freight' in the City of New Amsterdam. And so the American Sephardic Jewish story begins. Here Stephen...