This book provides a history of the New York City Subway system from its beginnings at the start of the 20th century to the present day. From one line in 1904, it now operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with 6,400 cars, 468 stations, 4.5 million daily users and 842 miles of track - a longer distance than New York to Chicago.

Growing up in small-town, Depression-era Oklahoma, Mickey Mantle heard the same plea day in and day out from his parents: 'Get out of the house and play some baseball ' Sooner than anyone expected, Mantle was a New York Yankee in 1951. This book presents the biography of Mickey Mantle.

Born in South Dakota in 1831, Sitting Bull was given his father's name after killing his first buffalo as a teenager. Sitting Bull witnessed the downfall of his people's way of life after the California gold rush of 1849 and the opening up of the West by the railroad. After he was wounded in battle, his views hardened about the presence of whites in Sioux land. He began to assume an uncompromising militancy that would characterize the rest of his life. Developing into one of the most important chiefs, Sitting Bull was able to unite a multitude of Sioux bands and other tribes at his camp,...

Born into a wealthy Venezuelan Creole family, Sim n Bol var grew up petulant, capricious, bossy, and accustomed to getting his own way at every turn. By the age of 22, however, he had matured to the point of committing to the liberation of northern South America from Spanish rule. To do so, the George Washington of Latin American independence, known as El Libertador, traveled 20,000 miles on horseback and fought in almost 300 battles and skirmishes. One of the greatest military geniuses of all time, Bol var, at his peak, controlled close to three million square miles in South America, more...

Biography of the legendary showman who introduced audiences worldwide to the American West.

In 1933, in his first inaugural address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared, ... the only thing we have to fear is fear itself... Yet, Roosevelt knew that the fear he spoke of was grounded in reality. With one-third of the nation's workforce unemployed, grown men scrounged in garbage cans for discarded scraps to feed their families. Six thousand street-corner apple vendors sold their product in New York City alone. Fear, indeed, stocked the land of the 1930s during Great Depression a defining event of 20th-century America. With the introduction of Roosevelt's New Deal, many families...

No one knows why the Moai, nearly a thousand megalithic volcanic statues, were carved, transported, and erected or why they were all found facedown by European explorers. In addition, did a Stone Age population of less than 10,000 actually deforest the land, causing environmental devastation? There were as many as 16 million Chilean palms covering 70 percent of the island when the settlers first appeared, but Westerners in the early 18th century were astonished by the total absence of trees. Furthermore, the islanders adopted a new cult based on the worship of birds and in the process,...

Unlike most boys growing up, Valentino Garavani never wanted to be a fireman, a policeman, a forest ranger, or an airline pilot. Imbued with an aesthetic sense and love of beauty from an early age, the future Italian haute couture dress designer knew where his destiny lay in making women stunningly gorgeous by dressing them in the most refined, elegant, and exclusive garments imaginable. To achieve his dream, Valentino left Italy at the age of 17 for Paris, the capital of post-World War II high fashion. Ten years later, he was in business for himself, and nine years after that, he was...