A tale of sex, greed and Filipinos on Coney Island
Finding workers wasn’t easy. Peruvian guano lords, unable to recruit their compatriots, relied mainly on Chinese laborers, whom they lured onto eastbound ships with false promises or sometimes simply kidnapped—between 1847 and 1874, at least sixty-eight of these ships mutinied. U.S. guano speculators gathered their workforce principally from Hawai‘
... See moreDaniel Immerwahr • How to Hide an Empire
Americans gone rogue, as Prentice puts it, have long been a part of the Philippines’ landscape, but Truman Hunt, an inveterate liar, a bigamist and a slave driver, seems nearly unparalleled as far as scoundrels go. In some sense, this slick-talking charlatan becomes a stand-in for America itself, or a certain version of America in its more opportun
... See moreRobin Hemley • Claire Prentice’s ‘Lost Tribe of Coney Island’
Desperate for any ready source of cash, the right-of-way was sold to the state shortly after the disaster for $640,000, a sorry return indeed on a project that had required nearly $30 million, seven years, and the labor—and in quite a few cases, the lives—of a…
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Les Standiford • Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean
One of the few extant public acknowledgements of the Igorrote show is in Ghent, where an initiative to commemorate the city’s World Exhibition of 1913 lead to the naming of streets and tunnels after notable participants of this historical event, including Timicheg, one of the nine Igorrotes who died on Schneidewind’s European tour.