Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919

"Mike Wallace’s fabulous new work of encyclopedic nonfiction gives readers kaleidoscopic glimpses of turn-of-the-last-century New York. The 1,196-page telling is especially rich because of his “determination to include all the historical actors … left out of earlier studies,” with equal attention to women as well as dead white men. The result is both scholarly and pop: Were you aware that workers on the IRT subway line unearthed mastodon bones at Dyckman Street? Wallace summons great tycoons, ingrate robber barons and the Great War alike out of the gas-lit Gilded Age into the bright electric light of an exuberant 20th century."