A Capital Place is how the author remembers Minnesota's historic Sandy Lake: important fur-trading hub, promised land to a succession of Native American tribes, 18th-century capital of the Ojibwe Nation, strategic gateway to the Mississippi River from Lake Superior- and route followed by nearly all the famous men of Minnesota history.

A CAPITAL PLACE ...is how the author remembers Minnesota's historic Sandy Lake: important fur-trading hub, promised land to a succession of Native American tribes, 18th-century captial of the Ojibwe Nation, and strategic gateway to the Mississippi River from Lake Superiorroute follwed by nearly all the famous men of Minnesota History. In this Reminiscence spanning more than a half-century, Laursen writes of boyhood days on a primitive Sandy Lake fishing resort, of his long struggle to become a writer, of exciting years with a youthful Medtronic and of the inspiring seqence of events which led him and wife to a Bed & Breakfast Inn on the shores of Leech Lake.

“This superbly succinct and incisive book” on urban planning and real estate argues gentrification isn’t driven by latte-sipping hipsters—but is engineered by the capitalist state (Michael Sorkin, author of All Over the Map) Our cities are changing. Around the world, more and more money is being invested in buildings and land. Real estate is now a $217 trillion dollar industry, worth thirty-six times the value of all the gold ever mined. It forms sixty percent of global assets, and one of the most powerful people in the world—the former president of the United States—made his name as a landlord and developer. Samuel Stein shows that this explosive transformation of urban life and politics has been driven not only by the tastes of wealthy newcomers, but by the state-driven process of urban planning. Planning agencies provide a unique window into the ways the state uses and is used by capital, and the means by which urban renovations are translated into rising real estate values and rising rents. Capital City explains the role of planners in the real estate state, as well as the remarkable power of planning to reclaim urban life.

Acclaimed artist Kenneth Goldsmith’s thousand-page homage to New York City Here is a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York: an unparalleled and original homage to the city, composed entirely of quotations. Drawn from a huge array of sources—histories, memoirs, newspaper articles, novels, government documents, emails—and organized into interpretive categories that reveal the philosophical architecture of the city, Capital is the ne plus ultra of books on the ultimate megalopolis. It is also a book of experimental literature that transposes Walter Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus of literary montage on the modern city, The Arcades Project, from nineteenth-century Paris to twentieth-century New York, bringing the streets and its inhabitants to life in categories such as “Sex,” “Central Park,” “Commodity,” “Loneliness,” “Gentrification,” “Advertising,” and “Mapplethorpe.” Capital is a book designed to fascinate and to fail—for can a megalopolis truly ever be captured in words? Can a history, no matter how extensive, ever be comprehensive? Each reading of this book, and of New York, is a unique and impossible project.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, New York City was an undistinguished town, competing with Philadelphia and Boston to be America's dominant port city. Just two generations later, it had built itself into the country's powerhouse center of trade and finance, rivaled only by London as financial capital of the world. In Capital City, Thomas Kessner tells the story of this remarkable transformation. With the advantages of its famous harbor and the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, New York became the chief commercial center for the growing nation. As the shipping industry prospered, capital accumulated, and a growing banking center emerged, New York went on to finance the Union cause during the Civil War, open the West to development, and consolidate the national railroad system. The city's energy and opportunity attracted ambitious men from all over the country whose names became synonymous with big business: Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan. New York's banks set the interest rates for the nation, its stock exchange fixed the price of securities, its investors transformed American business from family-owned enterprises into modern corporations, and its growing political clout catapulted public figures, such as Samuel Tilden and Teddy Roosevelt, onto the national stage. Combining political and urban history with a colorful cast of characters, Capital City chronicles how Gotham's Gilded Age reshaped the metropolis and the nation as it molded our present-day economy.

The Capital Hotel is uniquely beautiful, with its cast-iron façade and marble lobby, its high-ceilinged rooms, and its rich history. Since its opening in 1876, it has been the stage for the struggles, schemes, and dreams of generations of politicians, debutantes, prostitutes, carpenters, and businessmen. And a wide variety of owners and visionaries has shaped the hotel's fortunes, among them the Yankee entrepreneur who started it all; the Italian immigrant family who kept it going in its worst days; the architect who envisioned new lives for old buildings; and the financiers and craftsmen who brought the Capital to its current glory as a luxury hotel. The story of the Capital Hotel is also the story of Little Rock, and of many American cities: built in the commercial boom of the 1870s, in full flower at the turn of the century, battered by the Depression, optimistic in the postwar era, but decrepit by the late 1960s, then renovated in the 1980s and thriving today. This lavishly illustrated volume traces the history of the hotel from its origins as a commercial building to its spectacular renovation into a jewel of downtown Little Rock.

"While many have examined how economic interests motivate political action, Bruce Carruthers explores the reverse relationship by focusing on how political interests shape a market. He sets his inquiry within the context of late Stuart England, when an active stock market emerged and when Whig and Tory parties vied for control of a newly empowered Parliament. Probing such connections between politics and markets at both institutional and individual levels, Carruthers ultimately argues that competitive markets are not inherently apolitical spheres guided by economic interest but rather ongoing creations of social actors pursuing multiple goals." -- BACK COVER.