Since peoples from around the globe began to come to America, Hoboken has always been a popular destination for immigrants. People migrated from Ireland, Germany, Italy, Russia, Puerto Rico and other countries to the city, hoping to find opportunity and prosperity for themselves and their families in America. Using Hoboken as a point of entry, many ultimately chose to remain in the Mile Square City. As they struggled to establish themselves, immigrants clashed with one another and with native-born Hobokenites as they influenced the citys politics, economics, religions and customs. Author Christina A. Ziegler-McPherson explores their struggles and the complicated conflicts that have influenced the ethnic and cultural environments of this New Jersey city.

"Smart and defiant. Rich with characters and anecdote and heart. A great success." --Anthony Swofford, New York Times Book Review Has the futureever more people with their houses, stores, roads, and sprawlbeen wrecking your past? Melissa Holbrook Pierson, with unalloyed insight, elucidates how it feels to lose that landscape of home. In the past twenty years, like countless towns it resembles, Akron, Ohio, has lost its singularity, and much of what native-daughter Pierson loves about it. She then moves to Hoboken, New Jersey, a forgotten appendage of New Yorkuntil stockbrokers discover it. Finally, she speaks of rural areas, telling of the thousands of upstate New Yorkers displaced by city reservoirs. A unique book uniquely of our moment: This is what it feels like to lose the place you love.

For a quarter century, I’ve pursued genealogical minutiae—the particulars of family compositions in the townlands of Eastern County Mayo and nineteenth century records of the Juchnewicz families of Girdziunai village in Lithuania. But genealogy is more than the obsessive collection of baptisms, marriages, and deaths. The study of family history is also the study of history. Musings traverses the sometimes grim, sometimes odd, events that occurred at the fact-jammed intersection of family history and history—a Revolutionary War massacre, the Black Tom munitions explosion in 1916, the embarkation of troops from Hoboken in World War I, the Women’s Army Corps in World War II, the lives of longshoremen in the New York harbor, and the lives of slaves on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. In our time—and a step ahead of a category 4 hurricane—Musings explores the history and culture of Jacksonville and Saint Augustine. We meet memorable characters on these journeys through time—miserly German spymasters, a psychologically astute general, a luckless Polish legionnaire, groundbreaking female soldiers, two runaway slaves in a Virginia jail, and the Cazique of Poyais, sovereign of an imaginary country. And we meet two timeless characters—the banshee and Count Dracula.

From a singing waiter, to a boy singer with the big bands, to the ‘Sultan of Swoon’, in just a few years in the 1940s Frank Sinatra became America’s epitome of class and elegance before becoming the Chairman of the Board. Ol’ blue eyes lived a life more colourful and exciting than almost anyone from his generation and it’s all here in this superbly illustrated book. It charts Frank Sinatra’s career – the highs, the lows, his hits, his loves and his films, with fantastic archive photographs that bring to life the faces, places and personalities that made his world so memorable. Frank was a massive success in Vegas with his sell out seasons and also got to sing with his mates in his very own Rat Pack. He retired from singing in the early seventies only to return proclaiming that ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes is Back’. He continued to record and perform dressed up in his ’tux’ until the mid-nineties. He passed away in 1998 aged 82. We shall never see his like again and as he so eloquently put it, “You only live once, and the way I live, once is enough.” This book tells the wonderful story of one of the greatest performing artists of all time!