Description
Founded by a small band of non secular freedom seekers in 1639, Newport, Rhode Island, due to this fact was a bustling colonial seaport teeming with artists, sailors, prosperous merchants and, in all probability such a lot distinctively, the ultra-wealthy families of the Gilded Age. Clinging to the lavish coattails of those newly minted millionaires and robber barons was once a stream of con artists and hangers-on who attempted to leech off their well-to-do neighbors. From the Vanderbilts to the Dukes, the Astors to the Kennedys, the City by the Sea has served as a sanctuary for the elite, and a hotbed of corruption. Local historian Larry Stanford pulls back the curtain on over 350 years of history, uncovering the actual stories at the back of many of Newport’s such a lot enduring mysteries, controversial characters and scintillating scandals.