All Around the Town: Murder, Scandal, Riot and Mayhem in Old New York (Adrenaline Classics)

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.

• The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld
• The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld
• The Gangs of Chicago (Illinois)
• The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld
• Sucker's Progress: An Informal History of Gambling in America
• Up from Methodism: A Memoir of a Man Gone to the Devil
• Queen of Thieves: The True Story of "Marm" Mandelbaum and Her Gangs of New York
• The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder