Beaumont was born when the thickly wooded banks of the Neches River were settled in the 1820s. Businessmen and adventurers stayed in the area once they saw the advantages of the river and the region's abundance of timber and other agricultural resources. By 1880, Beaumont was a lumber, ranching, farming, and shipping center. The railroad spurred population growth from 2,500 to 5,000, then Providence intervened: the Lucas Gusher at Spindletop blew in on January 10, 1901, and suddenly more oil than had ever been seen ushered in a new world. The Rockefeller Standard Oil monopoly may have ended in the courts, but Spindletop's oil dwarfed the known world supply, creating companies like Humble Oil (now ExxonMobil), Gulf, and Texaco. Beaumont continued to grow, and with a second boom in 1925, flowing oil brought more people and the building of a gracious city.

Concerns the case of Alexis St. Martin, whose relations with Beaumont are summarized in the introduction.

A captivating literary portrait of London explored at night by some of the city’s most iconic writers throughout history “Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night,” wrote the poet Rupert Brooke. Before the age of electricity, the nighttime city was a very different place to the one we know today – home to the lost, the vagrant and the noctambulant. Matthew Beaumont recounts an alternative history of London by focusing on those of its denizens who surface on the streets when the sun’s down. If nightwalking is a matter of “going astray” in the streets of the metropolis after dark, then nightwalkers represent some of the most suggestive and revealing guides to the neglected and forgotten aspects of the city. In this brilliant work of literary investigation, Beaumont shines a light on the shadowy perambulations of poets, novelists and thinkers: Chaucer and Shakespeare; William Blake and his ecstatic peregrinations and the feverish ramblings of opium addict Thomas De Quincey; and, among the lamp-lit literary throng, the supreme nightwalker Charles Dickens. We discover how the nocturnal city has inspired some and served as a balm or narcotic to others. In each case, the city is revealed as a place divided between work and pleasure, the affluent and the indigent, where the entitled and the desperate jostle in the streets. With a foreword and afterword by Will Self, Nightwalking is a fascinating literary exploration of the writers who traverse the city at night and the people they meet.

“Any story by Jance is a joy.” —Chattanooga Times Now fans of the enormously popular Sheriff Joanna Brady suspense series by J.A. Jance can discover another side to the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author. Until Proven Guilty—a riveting tale of the very worst kind of murder—marks the debut of Seattle Homicide Detective J.P. Beaumont. This Premium Plus edition of Until Proven Guilty—the classic novel that put the incomparable Jance on the crime fiction map—indisputably proves that she truly belongs “in the elite company of Sue Grafton and Patricia Cornwell” (Flint Journal).

Childhood in Ancient Athens offers an in-depth study of children during the heyday of the Athenian city state, thereby illuminating a significant social group largely ignored by most ancient and modern authors alike. It concentrates not only on the child's own experience, but also examines the perceptions of children and childhood by Athenian society: these perceptions variously exhibit both similarities and stark contrasts with those of our own 21st century Western society. The study covers the juvenile life course from birth and infancy through early and later childhood, and treats these life stages according to the topics of nurture, play, education, work, cult and ritual, and death. In view of the scant ancient Greek literary evidence pertaining to childhood, Beaumont focuses on the more copious ancient visual representations of children in Athenian pot painting, sculpture, and terracotta modelling. Notably, this is the first full-length monograph in English to address the iconography of childhood in ancient Athens, and it breaks important new ground by rigorously analysing and evaluating classical art to reconstruct childhood’s social history. With over 120 illustrations, the book provides a rich visual, as well as narrative, resource for the history of childhood in classical antiquity.

An illustrated history of Beaumont, Texas, paired with histories of the local companies.