A compilation of original, unabridged newspaper articles by Elizabeth Jane Cochran, who wrote under the name Nellie Bly. By disguising her voice, mannerisms and appearance, this intrepid reporter gained admittance to New Yorks vast cultural underground of criminals, con artists, and frauds, and fearlessly exposed their scams and shenanigans to a rapt and growing audience on the front pages of Joseph Pulitzers The New York World. Blys reporting introduced the era of muckraking journalism, and originated the practice of undercover reporting that has remained a vital journalistic art to the...

In the western territories a young Theodore Roosevelt found inspiring loneliness and a hunter's paradise. Out here TR enjoyed tough physical challenges and a pleasing distance from the half-formed men of the East, who grasped so desperately for money and power. As the "open season" on buffalo, antelope, mountain goat and white-tailed deer brought these species close to extinction, however, he began to understand the meaning and value of conservation-a progression expressed eloquently in the articles he penned for Century, The Outlook, Outing, Forest and Stream and other journals. This volume...

After joining a ragtag militia of small-town acquaintances at the outbreak of the Civil War, Samuel Clemens soon discovered he had little aptitude for military life. He left the ranks in haste; in the same fateful spring of 1861, his brother Orion had been appointed secretary of the new western territory of Nevada. With arrest for his desertion looming, and no other promising vocation at hand, Clemens climbed aboard the westbound stagecoach with Orion at St. Joseph, Missouri on July 26. The brothers endured 21 long days on the trails heading over the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, to...