When James Ogilvie arrived in America in 1793, he was a deeply ambitious but impoverished teacher. By the time he returned to Britain in 1817, he had become a bona fide celebrity known simply as Mr. O, counting the nation's leading politicians and intellectuals among his admirers. And then, like so many meteoric American luminaries afterward, he fell from grace. The Strange Genius of Mr. O is at once the biography of a remarkable performer--a gaunt Scottish orator who appeared in a toga--and a story of the United States during the founding era. Ogilvie's career featured many of the hallmarks of celebrity we recognize from later eras: glamorous friends, eccentric clothing, scandalous religious views, narcissism, and even an alarming drug habit. Yet he captivated audiences with his eloquence and inaugurated a golden age of American oratory. Examining his roller-coaster career and the Americans who admired (or hated) him, this fascinating book renders a vivid portrait of the United States in the midst of invention.

Pig men . . . trolls . . . the curse of Miller Park . . . the Golden Plates of Voree. When it coms to weird, Wisconsin's got it! And nobody is better at telling the bizarre stories of the state's odd side than best-selling author and paranormal authority Linda Godfrey. Join the fun on an eyebrow-raising tour of people and places you won't believe!

Contains 101 curious tales and oddball facts about events and people from the fifty states.

Exotic, seductive, and doomed: the antebellum mixed-race free woman of color has long operated as a metaphor for New Orleans. Commonly known as a "quadroon," she and the city she represents rest irretrievably condemned in the popular historical imagination by the linked sins of slavery and interracial sex. However, as Emily Clark shows, the rich archives of New Orleans tell a different story. Free women of color with ancestral roots in New Orleans were as likely to marry in the 1820s as white women. And marriage, not concubinage, was the basis of their family structure. In The Strange History of the American Quadroon, Clark investigates how the narrative of the erotic colored mistress became an elaborate literary and commercial trope, persisting as a symbol that long outlived the political and cultural purposes for which it had been created. Untangling myth and memory, she presents a dramatically new and nuanced understanding of the myths and realities of New Orleans's free women of color.

Emily shows how she sees the world and how deceptive sight can be, in this book of illusions and surprises.

The international bestselling author of Fermat’s Last Theorem explores the eccentric lives of history’s foremost mathematicians. From Archimedes’s eureka moment to Alexander Grothendieck’s seclusion in the Pyrenees, bestselling author Amir Aczel selects the most compelling stories in the history of mathematics, creating a colorful narrative that explores the quirky personalities behind some of the most groundbreaking, influential, and enduring theorems. Alongside revolutionary innovations are incredible tales of duels, battlefield heroism, flamboyant arrogance, pranks, secret societies, imprisonment, feuds, and theft—as well as some costly errors of judgment that prove genius doesn’t equal street smarts. Aczel’s colorful and enlightening profiles offer readers a newfound appreciation for the tenacity, complexity, eccentricity, and brilliance of our greatest mathematicians.