From the author of Lost Milwaukee comes an exploration of the criminal side of the Cream City. Milwaukee saw its share of violence as it transformed from frontier village to modern metropolis. The city was barely established when an argument over a bridge linking east and west was nearly settled with cannon fire. A local developer killed his estranged wife, severed her head, and burned it in the furnace of the apartment building he built. A wronged woman murdered her lover on a busy downtown street and was found innocent by a sympathetic jury. Another woman lethally poisoned her family and laughed about it in the press. From a robbery in which the bandits got away by stealing a streetcar to the attempted assassination of President Theodore Roosevelt, local historian Carl Swanson uncovers dramatic true stories of villainy and murder from Milwaukee's long-forgotten past.

From City Hall to the Pabst Theater, reminders of the past are part of the fabric of Milwaukee. Yet many historic treasures have been lost to time. An overgrown stretch of the Milwaukee River was once a famous beer garden. Blocks of homes and apartments replaced the Wonderland Amusement Park. A quiet bike path now stretches where some of fastest trains in the world previously thundered. Today's Estabrook Park was a vast mining operation, and Marquette University covers the old fairgrounds where Abraham Lincoln spoke. Author Carl Swanson recounts these stories and other tales of bygone days.

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The sky was the limit, as the Mafia indulged in running alcohol, extortion, protection rackets, adn skimming from Las Vegas casinos. The Cream City had its crooked lawyers, corrupt cops, and even a mayor on the take. There was the blood of those who dared to stand in the syndicate's way, who were found dead in ditches or as victims of car bombs. While now considered extinct, the Milwaukee Family was once a dominant force in the Midwest.

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.