Bill's Books
A DIRTY YEAR
Sex, Suffrage, & Scandal
in Gilded Age New York
A nonfiction narrative of 1872 New York, a city convulsing with social upheaval and sexual revolution and beset with all the excitement and challenges a moment of transformation brings.
From Chicago Review Press, April 2020
And from New York's Dutch Era
A Novel of New Amsterdam
The Mevrouw Who Saved Manhattan
"[A] romp through the history of New Netherland that would surely have Petrus Stuyvesant complaining about the riot transpiring between its pages."
- de Halve Maen, Journal of the Holland Society of New York
Side Stories
Galleries
Satire of the Age
THE LITTLER RED LOUNGE;
OR, BEECHER'S FIX
There lived in Brooklyn, high above the bay,
A Pastor old, with spirit light and gay;
Of gentle manners as of generous race,
Blest, with much sense, true inwardness & grace,
Yet, led astray by Venus' soft delights,
He scarce could rule some idle appetites;
For all we know since Noah and the flood,
The best of pastors are but flesh and blood.
- Opening of a poem on Henry Ward Beecher's adultery, 1875. FULL POEM
Click images to pop up enlargements
Queens of Finance Victoria Woodhull & Tennie Claflin driving Wall Street Bulls & Bears
Anthony Comstock in court: "Your Honor, this woman gave birth to a naked child!"