{"title":"Of History Jules Tygiel","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"great-los-angeles-swindle-book-of-history-jules-tygiel-9780195054897","title":"The Great Los Angeles Swindle","description":"In Los Angeles in the 1920s, C.C. Julian and the Julian Petroleum Corporation were household words, and the Julian Pete swindle ranked with Teapot Dome as one of the great scandals of the era. It symbolized not merely what FDR would call a decade of debauchery of group selfishness, but the failed hopes and dreams of the great boom of the 1920s. Indeed, no single story captures the essence of that decade in America--its boosterism and rampant speculation, its entrepreneurial mania for mergers, its overlap of business and politics, and its infatuation with wealth, whiskey, and Hollywood glamor--quite so well as the Julian Petroleum swindle.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cem\u003eThe Great Los Angeles Swindle\u003c\/em\u003e begins with a murder (the sudden courtroom shooting of banker Motley Flint, the debonaire movie financier and city booster), ends with a spectacular suicide in Shanghai (where C.C. Julian downs a vial of poison after a lavish champagne dinner), and, in between, takes as many unexpected twists and turns as any mystery novel. Jules Tygiel offers a gripping account of this wonderfully complex scandal, which features such legendary figures as Louis B. Mayer, Cecil B. DeMille, Charlie Chaplin (who decks Julian in a fistfight in Hollywood's posh Cafe Petroushka), \u003cem\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/em\u003e publisher Harry Chandler, H.M. Haldeman (grandfather of Watergate's H.R. Haldeman), and pioneer radio evangelist Fighting Bob Shuler. Conmen, bankers, underworld kingpins, political bosses, a corrupt district attorney, bribed jurors, and other colorful characters round out the cast.\u003cbr\u003e At the book's center stands the flamboyant C.C. Julian, a likable if unscrupulous promoter, whose life was flavored with controversy. Tygiel follows Julian to Los Angeles, where during the spectacular oil boom of the 1920s, his innovative newspaper advertising and early successes (Julian No. 1 still pumped oil decades after the promoter himself had died) won him a devoted following. Force to cut back production by major oil companies, he created Julian Petroleum, which he promised would soon rival Standard Oil. Dispensing Defiance Gasoline from its pumps, Julian Petroleum fought off the efforts of state regulatory agencies and federal investigators to shut it down, before Julian had to surrender ownership to oilman S.C. Lewis. Lewis and his crafty associate, Jacob Berman, over-issued millions of shares of counterfeit stock while pyramiding stock pools and loan schemes into a $150,000,000 fraud. The infamous Million Dollar Pool (which included Flint, Mayer, Haldeman, and other prominent Los Angeles businessmen) delivered lucrative profits to its elite members, while tens of thousands of small investors lost their nest eggs when Julian Petroleum collapsed in 1927. The aftermath of the scandal included the longest trial in the history of the county (which produced 99 volumes of trial transcripts, cost in excess of $250,000, and convicted no one), unseated a district attorney and a governor, enthroned a former Ku Klux Klansman as mayor of Los Angeles, and filled the courts with related cases and scandalous revelations well into the Depression decade.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cem\u003eThe Great Los Angeles Swindle\u003c\/em\u003e is a saga of the roaring twenties, with its glorification of business, its get-rich-quick mentality, and its paucity of government regulation, which bred speculation, corruption, and corporate chaos throughout the nation in a manner not dissimilar to the financial chicanery of our own era. Above all, it is a compelling story and swiftly moving narrative that readers will not soon forget.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49547239325969,"sku":"CIN019505489XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ LIKE_NEW \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346096591121,"sku":"CIN019505489XLN","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51691108270353,"sku":"CIN019505489XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":53699030941969,"sku":"CIN019505489XA","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/019505489X.jpg?v=1751037496"},{"product_id":"past-time-book-of-history-jules-tygiel-9780195089585","title":"Past Time","description":"Few writers know more about baseball's role in American life than Jules Tygiel. In Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, Tygiel penned a classic work, a landmark book that towers above most writing about the sport. Now he ranges across the last century and a half in an intriguing look at baseball as history, and history as reflected in baseball. In Past Time, Tygiel gives us a seat behind home plate, where we catch the ongoing interplay of baseball and American society. We begin in New York in the 1850s, where pre-Civil War nationalism shaped the emergence of a \"national pastime.\" We witness the true birth of modern baseball with the development of its elaborate statistics--the brainchild of English-born reformer, Henry Chadwick. Chadwick, Tygiel writes, created the sport's \"historical essence\" and even imparted a moral dimension to the game with his concepts of \"errors\" and \"unearned\" runs. Tygiel offers equally insightful looks at the role of rags-to-riches player-owners in the formation of the upstart American League and he describes the complex struggle to establish African-American baseball in a segregated world. He also examines baseball during the Great Depression (when Branch Rickey and Larry MacPhail saved the game by perfecting the farm system, night baseball, and radio broadcasts), the ironies of Bobby Thomson's immortal \"shot heard 'round the world,\" the rapid relocation of franchises in the 1950s and 1960s, and the emergence of rotisserie leagues and fantasy camps in the 1980s. In Past Time, Jules Tygiel provides baseball history with a difference. Instead of a pitch-by-pitch account of great games, in this groundbreaking book, the field is American history and baseball itself is the star.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50168541446417,"sku":"CIN0195089588G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51530020258065,"sku":"CIN0195089588VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0195089588.jpg?v=1751356457"},{"product_id":"baseball-s-great-experiment-book-of-history-jules-tygiel-9780195078268","title":"Baseball's Great Experiment","description":"When it was first published in 1983, Baseball's Great Experiment received glowing praise from virtually all quarters. The Chicago Sun-Times called it \"a thumpingly good baseball book,\" and Red Barber wrote in The New Republic that it was \"by far the most comprehensive single book on the subject.\" \"Eminently readable,\" added Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post Book World, \"not only is this a book that is long overdue, but it turns out to be a book that was well worth the wait.\" Baseball's Great Experiment tells the story of one of the most explosive and far-reaching episodes in American sports history, an event now enshrined in folklore. Jackie Robinson's breaking of baseball's color barrier in 1946 shook America almost as profoundly as the Supreme Court's decision upholding desegregation in public schools a few years later. But this book doesn't end with Robinson: Baseball's Great Experiment follows the entire saga of baseball integration through 1959, when the Boston Red Sox--the last all-white Major League team--brought up the black infielder \"Pumpsie\" Green from the minors. As Tygiel makes clear, the integration of baseball transformed not only American athletics, but American society as well. Two characters tower above all others: Robinson the gifted athlete, and Branch Rickey, then president of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Tygiel goes behind the scenes to recount Rickey's meticulous planning--his motives, his search for the right player, even his handling of sportscasters. Against the backdrop of a postwar America unprepared for the Civil Rights struggle, the story proceeds from Robinson's chilly reception among teammates and opponents alike, through his daily ordeal of taunts and death threats both on and off the field, to his triumph as rookie-of-the-year, when he led the Dodgers to the 1947 World Series, and ultimate recognition as one of the greatest players of all time. Robinson, however, was only the first of many blacks to play in the Majors, and Baseball's Great Experiment traces the complete, painfully slow process of desegregation, in the process telling the often neglected stories of men like Larry Doby, Satchel Paige, Roy Campanella, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and many other pioneers. Tygiel also offers a unique look at integration in the minor leagues, and the role that the lifting of the color barrier played in the battle against Jim Crow in the South. Based on interviews with dozens of players and baseball executives, contemporary newspaper accounts, and the personal papers of those who were there, this is the moving story of true courage--an unforgettable re-creation of a bygone era in America.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53487567405329,"sku":"CIN0195078268VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":53738965991697,"sku":"CIN0195078268A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780195078268.jpg?v=1777654884"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-of-history-jules-tygiel.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}