Texas Guinan


Book Description

"Texas Guinan was a night club hostess-funny, magnetic, loud."So begins the story of the notorious Roaring '20s personality who, with her signature "Hello Sucker!" transformed the simple grab-a-drink Prohibition speakeasy into a glamorous club with dancing girls, entertainment, and a star-studded clientele. Her friends and guests ranged from newspapermen like Walter Winchell, who quoted her daily, to Mae West, Rudolph Valentino, the Prince of Wales, and President Harding.Guinan was a devoted mythmaker and publicity hound, and her fictions were just as much of her story as the facts. Berliner's biography explores this as it chronicles Guinan's journey from small town Waco through multiple careers in vaudeville, musical theater, and the 2-reeler silent westerns that billed her as the "Female Bill Hart," to her emergence as an icon of the '20s. It follows the nightly shenanigans in Guinan's clubs, complete with her tangles with gangsters and U.S. Prohibition agents, culminating in her arrest for maintaining a public nuisance, i.e. working at a club that sold liquor illegally. She hired a young lawyer to defend her and 60 years later, his trial notes were uncovered by his granddaughter, the author.




Prohibition New York City: Speakeasy Queen Texas Guinan, Blind Pigs, Drag Balls and More


Book Description

"Texas Guinan was the queen of New York's speakeasies in the Roaring Twenties. Her clubs were backed by leading gangsters and welcomed some of the city's biggest sharks and swankest swells. Movie stars, flappers, madams, musicians and more flocked to midtown's "Wet Zone," Greenwich Village and Harlem for inebriated entertainment... Author David Rosen recounts Texas's adventurous life alongside tales of Gotham's nightlife when abstinence was the law of the land and breaking the law an all-American indulgence."--Back cover.




Hello, Sucker!


Book Description

Traces the life of the Texas-born silent film actress who achieved notoriety as the hostess of a Broadway nightclub during the Prohibition era.




Dry Manhattan


Book Description

In 1919, the United States made its boldest attempt at social reform: Prohibition. This "noble experiment" was aggressively promoted, and spectacularly unsuccessful, in New York City. In the first major work on Prohibition in a quarter century, and the only full history of Prohibition in the era's most vibrant city, Lerner describes a battle between competing visions of the United States that encompassed much more than the freedom to drink.




Fort Worth Stories


Book Description

Fort Worth Stories is a collection of thirty-two bite-sized chapters of the city’s history. Did you know that the same day Fort Worth was mourning the death of beloved African American “Gooseneck Bill” McDonald, Dallas was experiencing a series of bombings in black neighborhoods? Or that Fort Worth almost got the largest statue to Robert E. Lee ever put up anywhere, sculpted by the same massive talent that created Mount Rushmore? Or that Fort Worth was once the candy-making capital of the Southwest and gave Hershey, Pennsylvania, a good run for its money as the sweet spot of the nation? A remarkable number of national figures have made a splash in Fort Worth, including Theodore Roosevelt while he was President; Vernon Castle, the Dance King; Dr. H.H. Holmes, America’s first serial killer; Harry Houdini, the escape artist; and Texas Guinan, star of the vaudeville stage and the big screen. Fort Worth Stories is illustrated with 50 photographs and drawings, many of them never before published. This collection of stories will appeal to all who appreciate the Cowtown city.







Nostrums and Quackery


Book Description







New World Coming


Book Description

"To an astonishing extent, the 1920s resemble our own era, at the turn of the twenty-first century; in many ways that decade was a precursor of modern excesses....Much of what we consider contemporary actually began in the Twenties." -- from the Introduction The images of the 1920s have been indelibly imprinted on the American imagination: jazz, bootleggers, flappers, talkies, the Model T Ford, Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh's history-making flight over the Atlantic. But it was also the era of the hard-won vote for women, racial injustice, censorship, widespread social conflict, and the birth of organized crime. Bookended by the easy living of the Jazz Age, when the booze and money flowed seemingly without end, and the crash of '29 that led to breadlines and a level of human suffering not seen since World War I, New World Coming is a lively, entertaining, and all-encompassing chronological account of an age that defined America. Chronicling what he views as the most consequential decade of the past century, Nathan Miller -- an award-winning journalist and five-time Pulitzer nominee -- paints a vivid portrait of the 1920s, focusing on the men and women who shaped that extraordinary time, including, ironically, three of America's most conservative presidents: Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. In the Twenties, the American people soared higher and fell lower than they ever had before. As unprecedented economic prosperity and sweeping social change dazzled the public, the sensibilities and restrictions of the nineteenth century vanished, and many of the institutions, ideas, and preoccupations of our own age emerged. With scandal, sex, and crime the lifeblood of the tabloids, the contemporary culture of celebrity and sensationalism took root and journalism became popular entertainment. By discarding Victorian idealism and embracing twentieth-century skepticism, America became, for the first time, thoroughly modernized. There is hardly a dimension of our present world, from government to popular culture, that doesn't trace its roots to the 1920s, and few decades are more intriguing or significant today. The first comprehensive view of the era since Only Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen's 1931 classic, New World Coming reveals this remarkable age from the vantage point of nearly a century later. It's all here -- the images and the icons, the celebrities and the legends -- in a book that will resonate with history readers, 1920s aficionados, and Americans everywhere.




Vaudeville old & new


Book Description




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