One-Night Stands with American History
$5.00
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One-Night Stands with American History
$5.00
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One-Night Stands with American History: Odd, Amusing, and Little-Known Incidents is a nonfiction book by Richard Shenkman and Kurt Reiger, originally published in 1980 and revised/updated in 2003. It collects verified, little-known, odd, and amusing anecdotes from American history — hoaxes, secrets, and bizarre incidents often involving famous figures — presented as "American history with the boring parts left out."
Sample anecdotes include:
President Ulysses S. Grant was arrested for speeding in his horse carriage.
J. Edgar Hoover refused to let people walk on his shadow.
H. L. Hunt, while bankrupt in 1921, won his first oil well in a game of five-card stud poker.
France shipped 25 prostitutes to Louisiana in 1721 because women were in short supply.
Shenkman, a New York Times bestselling history author and former George Mason University associate professor, co-wrote the book with Reiger, a Vanderbilt history grad and Wharton MBA. The 2003 revised edition (336 pp., HarperCollins/William Morrow) added two decades of new material and holds a ~3.7/5 rating on Goodreads.