From the dinosaurs and the glaciers to the first native peoples and the first European settlers, from Dutch and English Colonial rule to the American Revolution, from the slave society to the Civil War, from the robber barons and bootleggers to the war heroes and the happy rise of craft beer pubs, the Hudson Valley has a deep history. The Hudson Valley: The First 250 Million Years chronicles the Valley's rich and fascinating history and charms. Often funny, sometimes personal, always entertaining, this collection of essays offers a unique look at the Hudson Valley's most important and interesting people, places, and events.

Without William Shakespeare, we wouldn’t have literary masterpieces like Romeo and Juliet. But without Henry Condell and John Heminges, we would have lost half of Shakespeare’s plays forever! After the death of their friend and mentor, the two actors are determined to compile the First Folio and preserve the words that shaped their lives. They’ll just have to borrow, beg, and band together to get it done. Amidst the noise and color of Elizabethan London, THE BOOK OF WILL finds an unforgettable true story of love, loss, and laughter, and sheds new light on a man you may think you know.

A newly updated and revised edition of the classic and definitive guide to the best of the Hudson River Valley. For the last 20 years this has been the most trusted guide to exploring the Hudson River Valley's myriad attractions and providing everything the visitor?and resident?needs to know to enjoy this newly designated National Heritage Area that has been called ?America's Rhine.? Visit presidential homes ? great estates built by founding fathers and 19th-century tycoons ? a remarkable assortment of art museums with Old Master paintings and contemporary masterpieces ? the battlements of West Point and the site of the most important struggle of the Revolution ? the homes, studios and painting sites of Hudson River School artistsperforming arts centers ? the oldest and most famous horse-racing track in the country ? wineries ? lighthouses ? arboretums ? hot-air ballooning, river tubing, and bird watching for bald eagles ? historic districts ? antiquarian bookstores, antiques

The recently widowed “Mother of America” lies helpless in her Mount Vernon bed, ravaged by illness and cared for by the very slaves that will be free the moment she dies. As she begins to slip away, she falls deep into a fever dream of terrifying theatricality that investigates everything from her family to her historical legacy.

In 1793 James F. Brown was born a slave and in 1868 he died a free man. At age 34 he ran away from his native Maryland to spend the remainder of his life in upstate New York's Hudson Valley, where he was employed as a gardener by the wealthy, Dutch-descended Verplanck family on their estate in Fishkill Landing. Two years after his escape, he began a diary that he kept until two years before his death. In Freedom's Gardener, Myra B. Young Armstead uses seemingly small details from Brown's diaries--entries about weather, gardening, steamboat schedules, the Verplancks' social life, and other largely domestic matters--to construct a bigger story about the development of national citizenship in the United States in the years predating the Civil War. Brown's experience of upward mobility demonstrates the power of freedom as a legal state, the cultural meanings attached to free labour using horticulture as a particular example, and the effectiveness of the vibrant political and civic sphere characterizing the free, democratic practices begun in the Revolutionary period and carried into the young nation. In this first detailed historical study of Brown's diaries, Armstead thus utilizes Brown's life to more deeply illuminate the concept of freedom as it developed in the United States in the early national and antebellum years. That Brown, an African American and former slave, serves as such a case study underscores the potential of American citizenship during his lifetime.

The disappearance of several apparently unrelated young women all over the country is the beginning of Mary Higgins Clark's chilling new novel, as one person begins to suspect that the young women may have all been murdered or abducted by the same man--and he may be somebody she knows.