Through a Fiery Trial - Softcover

Arnebeck, Bob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1568330278 ISBN 13: 9781568330273

Verlag: Madison Books, 1994

Inhaltsangabe

Book by Arnebeck Bob

Über diesen Titel

Críticas

To judge from the colorful, hugely entertaining, irreverent history, it's a wonder Washington, D.C., got built at all. George Washington welcomed Congress's decisions to move from Philadelphia to the Potomac, but just before his death in 1799, the first president vented his spleen at nine years of inept financing, lawsuits, builders' inflated costs, real estate sharks' greed and other roadblocks that impeded the capital's developement. Obstinate French architect Pierre Charles L'Enfant jockeyed for total control of the city's construction, spreading confusion in his wake. His successor, Samuel Blodget, an ingratiating Bostonian, frittered away seven years trying to salvage a $350,000 lottery he organized to finance an unfinished hotel. Land speculator Thomas Jefferson, charmed by the capital's rural character, cultivated more botanists than he did investors in the city. Arnebeck draws on reams of previously untapped archival material for this exhaustive year-by-year chronicle. Publishers Weekly

Reseña del editor

Historians have dismissed the ten years it took to ready the new capital as nothing more than man's inability to tame a swamp. In a brilliant narrative Bob Arnebeck shows how with slave axe-men, lawyers' writs, and speculators' greed a hilly, well wooded paradise was turned into a land of stumps, ruts, shacks, and isolated mansions.The stories of slaves and workers are at last told.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: Madison Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1994
• ISBN 10: 1568330278
• ISBN 13: 9781568330273
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 701