Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports, has been an influential and defining force in American society since 1936. The organization's mission has remained essentially unchanged: to work for a fair, just, and safe marketplace for all consumers. The Consumers Union National Testing and Research Center in Yonkers, New York, is the largest nonprofit educational and consumer product testing center in the world. In addition to its testing facility...

17 selections from Antebellum author Susan Warner, who lived on Constitution Island from 1838 to 1885. The writings are her observations of the Hudson Highlands "during the days when sloops and steamboats plied the Hudson [River], when young people camped on the top of Storm King and picnicked on Revolutionary War fortifications, and when families that needed wood for heating and cooking chopped it themselves." -- from back cover

"It's now known as New York City's Roosevelt Island. Originally called Blackwell's Island, it housed a lunatic asylum, prison, hospital, workhouse and almshouse in the 19th century. This book re-creates what daily life was like on the island, what politics shaped it, and what constituted therapy and charity in the nineteenth century"--

When the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia adjourned late in the summer of 1787, the delegates returned to their states to report on the new Constitution, which had to be ratified by specially elected conventions in at least nine states. Pauline Maier recounts the dramatic events of the ensuing debate in homes, taverns, and convention halls, drawing generously on the speeches and letters of founding fathers, both familiar and forgotten, on...

Traces the history of Rhode Island to 1790 when it became the last colony to ratify the Constitution.