The author of the New York Times best-seller The Gangs of New York returns with a second volume of tales from Gotham's underworld. In this wonderfully colorful and surprising history, Herbert Asbury expands his purview beyond the Five Corners to the entire city of New York. From Lord Cornbury, a loonily corrupt, cross-dressing British governor of colonial days, to the Broadway pickpocket who built herself a mansion in Hoboken, where she set herself up as European royalty, to prohibitionist Carry Nation's first visit to a scornful city of saloons (and her memorable confrontation with the drunken John L. Sullivan), All Around the Town brings to vivid life a memorable range of characters, grifters, murderers, and madmen. Rediscovering a fascinating array of lost corners in the history of the city, Asbury shows that today's tabloid headlines have nothing on the daily goings-on 150 years ago. From "The Sawing-Off of Manhattan Island" to "The Wickedest Man in New York" to "The Flour Riot of 1837," these twenty-three lively and accessible accounts make for top-notch, eccentric popular history as told by a master.
Recommended." — Library Journal. Written by the bestselling author of The Gangs of New York, this wide-ranging survey of the Prohibition era is populated by bootleggers, gangsters, and corrupt police as well as such reformers as Frances E. Willard.
From the great raconteur of the American underworld, and author of The Gangs of New York, comes Sucker’s Progress: An Information History of Gambling in America. From Midwestern Riverboats to East Coast Racetracks, Herbert Asbury explores the legal and illegal history of gambling in pre-WWII America. Describing notorious gambling havens like Chicago and New Orleans, as well as lesser-known outposts in cities like Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Cincinnati, Ohio, Asbury examines the gambling houses, big and small, which peppered the American landscape. Also presented are the lives of some of America’s most famous gamblers, including Mike McDonald, John Morrissey, and Richard Canfield, as well as their infamous counterparts like “Canada Bill” and “Charley Black Eyes,” men who made their names as grifters and con men. Asbury also explores the games these men played, describing the rules and origins of dozens of dice and card games. From $1 lottery tickets to thousand dollar pokes antes, America’s love of gambling thrives today, but it was during Asbury’s era that gambling was established as an American passion. “Asbury embarked on what seems in retrospect an extraordinary mission: to document the entire underworld of America, from New Orleans to San Francisco....His studies of gambling, of the racial politics of the New Orleans French Quarter, and of the history of Chicago crime remain monuments to an ambition that was then confined to the fringes of pop history. Sucker’s Progress, his history of gambling and swindling in America, is dense with facts about a subject one would have thought persisted only as rumour and tall tale.”—A. GOPNIK, The New Yorker One of the best American books of its kind. He tells the story of the New York underworld of the past century, and his narrative is excellently presented in a book adorned with amusing pictures from the weeklies and newspapers.”—E. Pearson, The Sat. Rev. of Books
Herbert Asbury, author of THE GANGS OF NEW YORK and THE GANGS OF CHICAGO, turns his attention to chronicle the seedy action of San Francisco history; from its gold-rush glories to its subterranean opium dens. Houses of ill-repute slink alongside shanghaied sailors, and the tong wars. San Francisco's historic past is brought back to life in all it's scintillating glory.
Home to the notorious 'Blue Book' which listed the names and addresses of every prostitute living in the city, New Orleans's infamous red-light district gained a reputation as one of the most raucous in the world. But the New Orleans underworld consisted of much more than the local bordellos. It was also well known as the early gambling capital of the USA and sported one of the most violent records of street crime in the country. In 'The Gangs of New Orleans', Herbert Asbury conronicles the immense underbelly of 'The Big Easy'. From the murderous exploits of Mary Jane 'Bricktop' Jackson and Bridget Fury, two prostitutes who became famous after murdering a number of their associates, to the faux-revolutionary 'filibusters' who, backed by hundreds of thousands of dollars of public support - though without official governmental approval - undertook military missions to take over the bordering Spanish regions in Texas, the French Quarter had it all. Once again, Asbury takes the reader on an intriguing journey through a unique history of the American underworld.
Home to the notorious "Blue Book," which listed the names and addresses of every prostitute living in the city, New Orleans's infamous red-light district gained a reputation as one of the most raucous in the world. But the New Orleans underworld consisted of much more than the local bordellos. It was also well known as the early gambling capital of the United States, and sported one of the most violent records of street crime in the country. In The French Quarter, Herbert Asbury, author of The Gangs of New York, chronicles this rather immense underbelly of "The Big Easy." From the murderous exploits of Mary Jane "Bricktop" Jackson and Bridget Fury, two prostitutes who became famous after murdering a number of their associates, to the faux-revolutionary "filibusters" who, backed by hundreds of thousands of dollars of public support—though without official governmental approval—undertook military missions to take over the bordering Spanish regions in Texas, the French Quarter had it all. Once again, Asbury takes the reader on an intriguing, photograph-filled journey through a unique version of the American underworld.
In the immediate sequel to The Gangs of New York, Herbert Asbury expands his purview beyond the Five Corners into a wonderful and surprising history of the whole city of New York. All Around the Town brings to authentic life a memorable range of characters, grifters, murderers and madmen. From “The Sawing-Off of Manhattan Island” to “The Wickedest Man in New York” to “The Flour Riot of 1837,” these twenty-three lively and accessible accounts make for top-notch, eccentric popular history as told by a master.
The history of the Barbary Coast properly begins with the gold rush to California in 1849. If the precious yellow metal hadn't been discovered ... the development of San Francisco's underworld in all likelihood would have been indistinguishable from that of any other large American city. Instead, owing almost entirely to the influx of gold-seekers and the horde of gamblers, thieves, harlots, politicians, and other felonious parasites who battened upon them, there arose a unique criminal district that for almost seventy years was the scene of more viciousness and depravity, but which at the same time possessed more glamour, than any other area of vice and iniquity on the American continent. The Barbary Coast is Herbert Asbury's classic chronicle of the birth of San Francisco—a violent explosion from which the infant city emerged full-grown and raging wild. From all over the world practitioners of every vice stampeded for the blood and money of the gold fields. Gambling dens ran all day including Sundays. From noon to noon houses of prostitution offered girls of every age and race. (In the 1850s, San Francisco was home to only one woman for every thirty men. It was not until 1910 that the sexes achieved anything close to parity in their populations.) This is the story of the banditry, opium bouts, tong wars, and corruption, from the eureka at Sutter's Mill until the last bagnio closed its doors seventy years later.
In 1926, while a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, Herbert Asbury, great-great-nephew of Francis Asbury, the first American Bishop of the Methodist Church, submitted a chapter of his profane work-in-progress, an almost spiteful memoir of his boyhood in the Ozark town of Farmington, Missouri, to H.L Mencken's American Mercury magazine. Mencken published "Hatrack," the story of the town's prostitute, in the April issue. The Mercury was then banned in Boston at the incitement of J. Frank Chase, the head of the New England Watch and Ward Society, who called the story "bad, vile, raw stuff." Mencken was arrested selling the magazine to Chase on Boston Common in a stunt designed to provoke the free-speech trials that followed. In its restrained, but unrelenting attack on religious bigotry, irrationality, and hypocrisy, the book that was published soon thereafter retains its transgressive power today. Its taunting title, playing on Booker T. Washington's early-century bestseller Up from Slavery, gives an idea of what Asbury thought he had escaped. In his mocking humor and plain-spun language, used to evoke a bygone South suffocating in its fear of pleasure and damnation, Asbury reveals his debt to another son of Missouri, Mark Twain.
The history of the Barbary Coast properly begins with the gold rush to California in 1849. Owing almost entirely to the influx of gold-seekers and the horde of gamblers, thieves, harlots, politicians, and other felonious parasites who battened upon them, there arose a unique criminal district that for almost seventy years was the scene of more viciousness and depravity, but which at the same time possessed more glamour, than any other area of vice and iniquity on the American continent. The Barbary Coast is the chronicle of the birth of San Francisco. From all over the world practitioners of every vice stampeded for the blood and money of the gold fields. Gambling dens ran all day including Sundays. From noon to noon houses of prostitution offered girls of every age and race. This is the story of the banditry, opium bouts, tong wars, and corruption, from the eureka at Sutter’s Mill until the last bagnio closed its doors seventy years later.
I am ninety- four years of age, and I have begun looking back over seventy-four years of being an ordained minister. I decided I should write a testimony of what God has done in the combined lives of my wife Maria and myself. We were married for almost seventy-two years when she died in 2009. This volume has the history of a long successful marriage. At the beginning if the Great Depression, both of our parents lost control of their farms and had to depend on the government for income. Both of us were penniless farm teenagers. Taking a clue from the Scriptures that often refers to the experiences of life as a walk; we have used that term for our life together. We started lives in the valley of poverty and moved uphill from one achievement to another. This book is the story of that journey. The main part of this book is a record of being a minister, a professor and over two decades of retirement. Without the expert assistance and encouragement of Maria, this goal would not have happened.
Herbert Asbury was known as the Dean of True Crime but did you know that he wrote some eerie thrillers back in the 20s? Long out of print, the book is brought back with an introduction by John Pelan, who knows his pulp thrillers. With an intriguing cover by Gavin L. O'Keefe, this will make your library of oddball horror even more sinister.
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