Reprint of the original, first published in 1867.

The Women Who Made New York reveals the untold stories of the phenomenal women who made New York City the cultural epicenter of the world. Many were revolutionaries and activists, like Zora Neale Hurston and Audre Lorde. Others were icons and iconoclasts, like Fran Lebowitz and Grace Jones. There were also women who led quieter private lives but were just as influential, such as Emily Warren Roebling, who completed the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge when her engineer husband became too ill to work.--Amazon.com

One hundred fifty years ago the McCoy brothers of Springfield, Illinois, bet their fortunes on Abilene, Kansas, then just a slapdash way station. Instead of an endless horizon of prairie grasses, they saw a bustling outlet for hundreds of thousands of Texas Longhorns coming up the Chisholm Trail—and the youngest brother, Joseph, saw how a middleman could become wealthy in the process. This is the story of how that gamble paid off, transforming the cattle trade and, with it, the American landscape and diet. The Chisholm Trail follows McCoy’s vision and the effects of the Chisholm Trail from post–Civil War Texas and Kansas to the multimillion-dollar beef industry that remade the Great Plains, the American diet, and the national and international beef trade. At every step, both nature and humanity put roadblocks in McCoy’s way. Texas cattle fever had dampened the appetite for longhorns, while prairie fires, thunderstorms, blizzards, droughts, and floods roiled the land. Unscrupulous railroad managers, stiff competition from other brokers, Indians who resented the usurping of their grasslands, and farmers who preferred growing wheat to raising cattle all threatened to impede the McCoys’ vision for the trail. As author James E. Sherow shows, by confronting these obstacles, McCoy put his own stamp upon the land, and on eating habits as far away as New York City and London. Joseph McCoy’s enterprise forged links between cattlemen, entrepreneurs, and restaurateurs; between ecology, disease, and technology; and between local, national, and international markets. Tracing these connections, The Chisholm Trail shows in vivid terms how a gamble made in the face of uncontrollable natural factors indelibly changed the environment, reshaped the Kansas prairie into the nation’s stockyard, and transformed Plains Indian hunting grounds into the hub of a domestic farm culture.

When it comes to food, there has never been another city quite like New York. The Big Apple--a telling nickname--is the city of 50,000 eateries, of fish wriggling in Chinatown baskets, huge pastrami sandwiches on rye, fizzy egg creams, and frosted black and whites. It is home to possibly the densest concentration of ethnic and regional food establishments in the world, from German and Jewish delis to Greek diners, Brazilian steakhouses, Puerto Rican and Dominican bodegas, halal food carts, Irish pubs, Little Italy, and two Koreatowns (Flushing and Manhattan). This is the city where, if you choose to have Thai for dinner, you might also choose exactly which region of Thailand you wish to dine in. Savoring Gotham weaves the full tapestry of the city's rich gastronomy in nearly 570 accessible, informative A-to-Z entries. Written by nearly 180 of the most notable food experts-most of them New Yorkers--Savoring Gotham addresses the food, people, places, and institutions that have made New York cuisine so wildly diverse and immensely appealing. Reach only a little ways back into the city's ever-changing culinary kaleidoscope and discover automats, the precursor to fast food restaurants, where diners in a hurry dropped nickels into slots to unlock their premade meal of choice. Or travel to the nineteenth century, when oysters cost a few cents and were pulled by the bucketful from the Hudson River. Back then the city was one of the major centers of sugar refining, and of brewing, too--48 breweries once existed in Brooklyn alone, accounting for roughly 10% of all the beer brewed in the United States. Travel further back still and learn of the Native Americans who arrived in the area 5,000 years before New York was New York, and who planted the maize, squash, and beans that European and other settlers to the New World embraced centuries later. Savoring Gotham covers New York's culinary history, but also some of the most recognizable restaurants, eateries, and culinary personalities today. And it delves into more esoteric culinary realities, such as urban farming, beekeeping, the Three Martini Lunch and the Power Lunch, and novels, movies, and paintings that memorably depict Gotham's foodscapes. From hot dog stands to haute cuisine, each borough is represented. A foreword by Brooklyn Brewery Brewmaster Garrett Oliver and an extensive bibliography round out this sweeping new collection.