Books by Cecelia Tichi

A richly illustrated romp with America's Gilded Age leisure class—and those angling to join it Mark Twain called it the Gilded Age. Between 1870 and 1900, the United States' population doubled, accompanied by an unparalleled industrial expansion, and an explosion of wealth unlike any the world had ever seen. America was the foremost nation of the world, and New York City was its beating heart. There, the richest and most influential—Thomas Edison, J. P. Morgan, Edith Wharton, the Vanderbilts, Andrew Carnegie, and more—became icons, whose comings and goings were breathlessly reported in the papers of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. It was a time of abundance, but also bitter rivalries, in work and play. The Old Money titans found themselves besieged by a vanguard of New Money interlopers eager to gain entrée into their world of formal balls, debutante parties, opera boxes, sailing regattas, and summer gatherings at Newport. Into this morass of money and desire stepped Caroline Astor. Mrs. Astor, an Old Money heiress of the first order, became convinced that she was uniquely qualified to uphold the manners and mores of Gilded Age America. Wherever she went, Mrs. Astor made her judgments, dictating proper behavior and demeanor, men's and women's codes of dress, acceptable patterns of speech and movements of the body, and what and when to eat and drink. The ladies and gentlemen of high society took note. "What would Mrs. Astor do?” became the question every social climber sought to answer. And an invitation to her annual ball was a golden ticket into the ranks of New York's upper crust. This work serves as a guide to manners as well as an insight to Mrs. Astor's personal diary and address book, showing everything from the perfect table setting to the array of outfits the elite wore at the time. Channeling the queen of the Gilded Age herself, Cecelia Tichi paints a portrait of New York's social elite, from the schools to which they sent their children, to their lavish mansions and even their reactions to the political and personal scandals of the day. Ceceilia Tichi invites us on a beautifully illustrated tour of the Gilded Age, transporting readers to New York at its most fashionable. A colorful tapestry of fun facts and true tales, What Would Mrs. Astor Do? presents a vivid portrait of this remarkable time of social metamorphosis, starring Caroline Astor, the ultimate gatekeeper.

Offers a richly illustrated exploration of the American era of gear-and-girder technology. A major consequence of this technology was its effect on the arts, in particular the literary arts. Three prominent American writers of the time - Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and William Carlos Williams - became designer-engineers of the word.

From Harriet Beecher Stowe's image of the Mississippi's "bosom" to Thoreau's Cape Cod as "the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts," the American environment has been represented in terms of the human body. Exploring such instances of embodiment, Tichi exposes the historically varied and often contrary geomorphic expression of a national paradigm.

Jack London (1876-1916) found fame with his wolf-dog tales and sagas of the frozen North, but Cecelia Tichi challenges the long-standing view of London as merely a mass-market producer of potboilers. Thoroughly exploring London's importance as an artist and as a political and public figure, Tichi brings to life a man who merits recognition as one of America's foremost public intellectuals.