Bøger af Adam Selzer

Jake is trying to scrape up enough money delivering pizza to make a trip to Chicago when Violet Annie Moss appears in the back seat of his car. She's dressed like she just ran away from a production of My Fair Lady and smoking a pipe tobacco cigarette, and claims that she needs help: She works in 1867, where she just beat up Charles Dickens before his scheduled performance in New York, excatly 150 years ago. Now she's on the run. And she has money. Jake's girlfriend just dumped him for somebody's roleplaying game character, and he assumes Violet is just another gamer. But every man has his price, and Jake's is $300. He and Violet embark on an adventure through the dark underbelly of the Des Moines metropolitan area. Taking place on December 30, 1867, I Beat Up Charles Dickens is a hilarious, period-accurate novel full of mystery, romance, whip-smart dialogue, deep fried food on sticks, and debates about The Last Jedi.

One of Chicago’s landmark attractions, Graceland Cemetery chronicles the city’s sprawling history through the stories of its people. Local historian and Graceland tour guide Adam Selzer presents ten walking tours covering almost the entirety of the cemetery grounds. While nodding to famous Graceland figures from Marshall Field to Ernie Banks to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Selzer also leads readers past the vaults, obelisks, and other markers that call attention to less recognized Chicagoans like: Jessie Williams de Priest, the Black wife of a congressman whose 1929 invitation to a White House tea party set off a storm of controversy;Engineer and architect Fazlur Khan, the Bangladeshi American who revived the city's skyscraper culture;The still-mysterious Kate Warn (listed as Warn on her tombstone), the United States’ first female private detective.Filled with photographs and including detailed maps of each tour route, Graceland Cemetery is an insider's guide to one of Chicago's great outdoor destinations for city lore and history.

A compendium of killing that plots the most remarkable American homicides between the Civil War and Second World War onto maps and plans, alongside crime scene photographs and compelling expert analysis.

A biographical and historical account of serial killer H.H. Holmes calls on never-before-examined primary documents to reveal how he managed to take advantage of the crowds drawn by the 1893 World's Fair to create his own castle of horrors.

Flickering Empire tells the fascinating yet little-known story of how Chicago served as the unlikely capital of American film production in the years before the rise of Hollywood (1907-1913). As entertaining as it is informative, Flickering Empire straddles the worlds of academic and popular nonfiction in its vivid illustration of the rise and fall of the major Chicago movie studios in the mid-silent era (principally Essanay and Selig Polyscope). Colorful, larger-than-life historical figures, including Thomas Edison, Charlie Chaplin, Oscar Micheaux, and Orson Welles, are major players in the narrative-in addition to important though forgotten industry titans, such as "e;Colonel"e; William Selig, George Spoor, and Gilbert "e;Broncho Billy"e; Anderson.

The city of Chicago is unquestionably the weirdest and most haunted city in America! With a history dating back to the early 1800s that is filled with violent events, mysterious happenings and a lot of very strange characters, there is no other place like it in the country. Now, in the most complete book ever written on Chicago ghosts and strange history, the creators of the Weird Chicago Tours reveal just how that homegrown weirdness has shaped the city that we know today - and shows that Chicago iw weirder than any city should legally be allowed to be! With notebooks and cameras in hand, the Weird Chicago crew has scoured the city in search of the haunted, the odd and the offbeat. They have tracked down bizarre history, unusual people, weird roadside attractions, forgotten remnants of the past, unexplained happenings and more ghost stories than have appeared in any other book before, plus the truth behind many Chicago hauntings that you only thought you knew! From Hull House to Resurrection Mary, to Dillinger to Al Capone, this book showcases the most unusual aspects of Chicago - and just what makes it so haunted, weird & unique! Packed full of stuff that you aren't going to find anywhere else, this is a journey that you're never going to forget!

The lives of notorious bad guys, perpetrators of mischief, visionary--if misunderstood--thinkers, and other colorful antiheroes, jerks, and evil doers from history all get their due in the short essays featured in these enlightening, informative books. Speaking Ill of the Dead: Jerks in Chicago History features 15 short biographies of nefarious characters.

Discover the fascinating history of