Arsenic is rightly infamous as the poison of choice for Victorian murderers. Yet the great majority of fatalities from arsenic in the nineteenth century came not from intentional poisoning, but from accident. Kept in many homes for the purpose of poisoning rats, the white powder was easily mistaken for sugar or flour and often incorporated into the family dinner. It was also widely present in green dyes, used to tint everything from candles and candies to curtains, wallpaper, and clothing (it was arsenic in old lace that was the danger). Whether at home amidst arsenical curtains and wallpapers, at work manufacturing these products, or at play swirling about the papered, curtained ballroom in arsenical gowns and gloves, no one was beyond the poison's reach. Drawing on the medical, legal, and popular literature of the time, The Arsenic Century paints a vivid picture of its wide-ranging and insidious presence in Victorian daily life, weaving together the history of its emergence as a nearly inescapable household hazard with the sordid story of its frequent employment as a tool of murder and suicide. And ultimately, as the final chapter suggests, arsenic in Victorian Britain was very much the pilot episode for a series of environmental poisoning dramas that grew ever more common during the twentieth century and still has no end in sight.

Wall Street and the Russian Revolution will give readers critical insight into what might be called the "Secret History of the 20th century." The Russian Revolution, like the war in which it was born, represents the real beginning of the modern world. The book will look not just at the sweep of events, but probe the economic, ideological and personal motivations of the key figures involved, revealing heretofore unknown or misunderstood connections. Was Trotsky, for instance, a political genius, an unprincipled egomaniac, or something of each? Readers should come away with not only a far deeper understanding of what happened in Russia a century ago, but also what happened in America and how that still shapes the relations of the twocountries today.