This true crime biography chronicles the misadventures of a lady outlaw who caused havoc across the late-19th century northern plains. The American historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously declared the 1890s to be the close of the American Frontier. But from 1887 to 1893, a young woman known as Nellie King was far from being tamed. King scandalized the residents of the Dakotas, Minnesota and northern Wisconsin with her fetching appearance, eccentric behavior, and criminal misdeeds. In Minnesota’s Notorious Nellie King, biographer Jerry Kuntz pieces together King’s legendary life—as well as the clues to her true identity. King employed more than a dozen aliases throughout her career as a fake detective, horse thief, laudanum fiend, and general disturber of the peace across the northern plains. She attracted sensational headlines, love-struck suitors, and stray revolver shots with equal abandon; her story’s Dickensian cast of characters included a hapless counterfeiter, a dashing physician, a battle-hardened magician, and a determined mother.

A comprehensive history of the first three decades of underwater exploration in antebellum America. Beginning in 1837, some of the most brilliant engineers of America’s Industrial Revolution turned their attention to undersea technology. Inventors developed practical hard-helmet diving suits, as well as new designs of submarines, diving bells, floating cranes, and undersea explosives. These innovations were used to clear shipping lanes, harvest pearls, mine gold, and wage war. All of these underwater technologies were brought together by entrepreneurs, treasure-hunters, and daring divers in the 1850s to salvage three infamous shipwrecks on Lake Erie, each of which had involved the loss of hundreds of lives, as well as the worldly goods of the passengers. The prospect of treasure, combined with the national notoriety of these disasters, soon attracted the attention of local adventurers and the country’s leading divers and marine engineers. In The Heroic Age of Diving, Jerry Kuntz shares the fascinating stories of the pioneers of underwater invention and the brave divers who employed the new technologies as they raced with—and against—marine engineers to salvage the tragic wrecks of Lake Erie. “Jerry Kuntz has filled in a previously blank page in the story of diving—and done it well. The Heroic Age of Diving tells the story not only of the development of salvage technology but also the human side of this always-dangerous and often-deadly career. This is not a tale for the faint of heart (‘helmet squeeze’ is a gruesome fate), but one well worth reading for those interested in early technology and the men brave (or foolish) enough to gamble their lives using it. This book is a window on an unexplored (and unexpected) world, and the author deserves great credit for bringing it back into the light.” — Chuck Veit, author of Raising Missouri: John Gowen and the Salvage of the U.S. Steam Frigate Missouri, 1843–1852 “The Heroic Age of Diving is both very interesting and very important. Having spent over twenty years researching and publishing general diving history, I am confident that this book will fill an important gap in the nation’s diving history.” — Leslie Leaney, Cofounder, Historical Diving Society

A revelatory history of the women who brought Victorian criminals to account--and how they became a cultural sensation From Wilkie Collins to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the traditional image of the Victorian detective is male. Few people realise that women detectives successfully investigated Victorian Britain, working both with the police and for private agencies, which they sometimes managed themselves. Sara Lodge recovers these forgotten women's lives. She also reveals the sensational role played by the fantasy female detective in Victorian melodrama and popular fiction, enthralling a public who relished the spectacle of a cross-dressing, fist-swinging heroine who got the better of love rats, burglars, and murderers alike. How did the morally ambiguous work of real women detectives, sometimes paid to betray their fellow women, compare with the exploits of their fictional counterparts, who always save the day? Lodge's book takes us into the murky underworld of Victorian society on both sides of the Atlantic, revealing the female detective as both an unacknowledged labourer and a feminist icon.

"Marriage is okay, but adultery is more fun. Just ask Lucy." --Desi Arnaz Starkly at odds with the utopian fantasies of Classic TV, Desi Arnaz defined his real-life marriage to Lucille Ball like this: "We were anything but Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. They had nothing to do with us. We dreamed of success, fame, and fortune. And guess what? It all led to hell." Here from the most prolific biographers in show biz comes an unvarnished overview of the tormented married couple who transformed the manic eccentricities of LUCY into one of the most profitable icons of the Atomic Age.

Love him or loathe him, Ned Kelly has been at the heart of Australian culture and identity since he and his gang were tracked down in bushland by the Victorian police and came out fighting, dressed in bulletproof iron armour made from farmers' ploughs.