I wish to acknowledge all those who have helped me with the preparation of this book. First, the completion of this book would not have been possible without a Faculty Research Fellowship from the Faculty Center for Academic Excellence and Innovation and the Provost’s Office at Johnson & Wales University. In addition, I would like to thank Ryan Tainsh, the director of the Faculty Center...

For more than two years, from December 2006 to January 2009, one of the most sought after tickets on Broadway was for Spring Awakening, a musical based on an 1891 play by German dramatist Frank Wedekind. The subject matter of the musical, not a sudden fascination with fin-de-siècle Berlin, accounted for its popularity. For two hours, audiences, many of them teenagers,...

In 1867, British-born American artist Seymour Joseph Guy painted a young girl indulging in an imaginative fantasy. In this single image, a virtual emblem of the...

The early twentieth-century city could be both an exciting and a dangerous place. This reality became tragically apparent to Adelaide Wheeler when, on Saturday, March 27, 1910, she identified the charred remains of her adolescent sister Ruth, who had disappeared on the preceding Thursday. Even for people as inured to the sordid details of death and violence as early twentieth-century New...

During the 1922 Christmas season, New Yorkers and other readers of the New York Times were intrigued not only by what presents...

What worried the father of Martha Vichnes more? His missing daughter or his missing money? Vichnes, a World War I veteran living in Borough Park,...

Two girls appeared before Henry H. Curran, the Chief Magistrate of New York City in March 1944. One was seventeen, “black-eyed [and]...

When I sat down to begin writing this concluding chapter I had recently finished discussing Chinese philosophy with a class. We had been talking about the Daoist concept of the universe as existing in a constant state of change. I had been using the phrase “No one ever steps into the same river twice.” I have always considered that one line an apt encapsulation of not only the nature...

Ann Kordas is a professor in the Humanities Department at Johnson & Wales University. She received her PhD in history from Temple University and her JD from Boston University School of Law. She teaches classes in U.S. and world history, food history, and the history of supernatural belief. She is currently working on a history of pet keeping and a history of fortunetelling in the United...

LuElla D’Amico, Whitworth University; Markus P. J. Bohlmann, Seneca College; Vibiana Bowman Cvetkovic, Rutgers University; Adrian Schober, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne Titles in the Series