The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford

The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford
Author: Robert W. P. Cutler
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780804747936

Jane Stanford, the co-founder of Stanford University, died in Honolulu in 1905, shortly after surviving strychnine poisoning in San Francisco. The inquest testimony of the physicians who attended her death in Hawaii led to a coroner’s jury verdict of murder—by strychnine poisoning. Stanford University President David Starr Jordan promptly issued a press release claiming that Mrs. Stanford had died of heart disease, a claim that he supported by challenging the skills and judgment of the Honolulu physicians and toxicologist. Jordan’s diagnosis was largely accepted and promulgated in many subsequent historical accounts. In this book, the author reviews the medical reports in detail to refute Dr. Jordan’s claim and to show that Mrs. Stanford indeed died of strychnine poisoning. His research reveals that the professionals who were denounced by Dr. Jordan enjoyed honorable and distinguished careers. He concludes that Dr. Jordan went to great lengths, over a period of nearly two decades, to cover up the real circumstances of Mrs. Stanford’s death.

American Disruptor

American Disruptor
Author: Roland De Wolk
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2021-04-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0520383230

The rags-to-riches story of Silicon Valley's original disruptor. American Disruptor is the untold story of Leland Stanford – from his birth in a backwoods bar to the founding of the world-class university that became and remains the nucleus of Silicon Valley. The life of this robber baron, politician, and historic influencer is the astonishing tale of how one supremely ambitious man became this country's original "disruptor" – reshaping industry and engineering one of the greatest raids on the public treasury for America’s transcontinental railroad, all while living more opulently than maharajas, kings, and emperors. It is also the saga of how Stanford, once a serial failure, overcame all obstacles to become one of America’s most powerful and wealthiest men, using his high elective office to enrich himself before losing the one thing that mattered most to him—his only child and son. Scandal and intrigue would follow Stanford through his life, and even after his death, when his widow was murdered in a Honolulu hotel—a crime quickly covered up by the almost stillborn university she had saved. Richly detailed and deeply researched, American Disruptor restores Leland Stanford’s rightful place as a revolutionary force and architect of modern America.

Who Killed Jane Stanford?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University

Who Killed Jane Stanford?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University
Author: Richard White
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2022-05-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1324004347

Named One of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 by the Los Angeles Times A premier historian penetrates the fog of corruption and cover-up still surrounding the murder of a Stanford University founder to establish who did it, how, and why. In 1885 Jane and Leland Stanford cofounded a university to honor their recently deceased young son. After her husband’s death in 1893, Jane Stanford, a devoted spiritualist who expected the university to inculcate her values, steered Stanford into eccentricity and public controversy for more than a decade. In 1905 she was murdered in Hawaii, a victim, according to the Honolulu coroner’s jury, of strychnine poisoning. With her vast fortune the university’s lifeline, the Stanford president and his allies quickly sought to foreclose challenges to her bequests by constructing a story of death by natural causes. The cover-up gained traction in the murky labyrinths of power, wealth, and corruption of Gilded Age San Francisco. The murderer walked. Deftly sifting the scattered evidence and conflicting stories of suspects and witnesses, Richard White gives us the first full account of Jane Stanford’s murder and its cover-up. Against a backdrop of the city’s machine politics, rogue policing, tong wars, and heated newspaper rivalries, White’s search for the murderer draws us into Jane Stanford’s imperious household and the academic enmities of the university. Although Stanford officials claimed that no one could have wanted to murder Jane, we meet several people who had the motives and the opportunity to do so. One of these, we discover, also had the means.

The Inventor and the Tycoon

The Inventor and the Tycoon
Author: Edward Ball
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013-11-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0767929403

A Chicago Tribune Noteworthy Book of the Year Nearly 140 years ago, in frontier California, photographer Eadweard Muybridge captured time with his camera and played it back on a flickering screen, inventing the breakthrough technology of moving pictures. Yet the visionary inventor Muybridge was also a murderer who killed coolly and meticulously, and his trial became a national sensation. Despite Muybridge’s crime, the artist’s patron, railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University, hired the photographer to answer the question of whether the four hooves of a running horse ever left the ground all at once—and together these two unlikely men launched the age of visual media. Written with style and passion by National Book Award-winner Edward Ball, this riveting true-crime tale of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads puts on display the virtues and vices of the great American West.

Effective Human Resource Management

Effective Human Resource Management
Author: Edward Lawler
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2012-07-04
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0804782687

Effective Human Resource Management is the Center for Effective Organizations' (CEO) sixth report of a fifteen-year study of HR management in today's organizations. The only long-term analysis of its kind, this book compares the findings from CEO's earlier studies to new data collected in 2010. Edward E. Lawler III and John W. Boudreau measure how HR management is changing, paying particular attention to what creates a successful HR function—one that contributes to a strategic partnership and overall organizational effectiveness. Moreover, the book identifies best practices in areas such as the design of the HR organization and HR metrics. It clearly points out how the HR function can and should change to meet the future demands of a global and dynamic labor market. For the first time, the study features comparisons between U.S.-based firms and companies in China, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and other European countries. With this new analysis, organizations can measure their HR organization against a worldwide sample, assessing their positioning in the global marketplace, while creating an international standard for HR management.

Advances in Organizational Justice

Advances in Organizational Justice
Author: Jerald Greenberg
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2002-03-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0804764581

This is a state-of-the-science book about organizational justice, which is the study of people’s perception of fairness in organizations. The volume’s contributors, all acknowledged leaders in this burgeoning field, present new theoretical positions, clarify existing paradigms, and identify future areas of application. The first chapter provides a comprehensive framework that integrates and synthesizes key concepts in the field: distributive justice, procedural justice, and retributive justice. The second chapter is a full theoretical analysis of how people use fairness judgments as means of guiding their reactions to organizations and their authorities. The subsequent two chapters examine the conceptual interrelationships between various forms of organizational justice. First, we are given a definitive review and analysis of interactional justice that critically assesses the evidence bearing on its validity. The next chapter argues that previous research has underemphasized important similarities between distributive and procedural justice, and suggests new research directions for establishing these similarities. The three following chapters focus on the social and interpersonal antecedents of justice judgments: the influence that expectations of justice and injustice can have on work-related attitudes and behavior; the construction of a model of the determinants and consequences of normative beliefs about justice in organizations that emphasizes the role of cross-cultural norms; and the potential impact of diversity and multiculturalism on the viability of organizations. The book’s final chapter identifies seven canons of organizational justice and warns that in the absence of additional conceptual refinement these canons may operate as loose cannons that threaten the existence of justice as a viable construct in the organizational sciences.

Bohemia in America, 1858–1920

Bohemia in America, 1858–1920
Author: Joanna Levin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2009-10-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0804772541

Bohemia in America, 1858–1920 explores the construction and emergence of "Bohemia" in American literature and culture. Simultaneously a literary trope, a cultural nexus, and a socio-economic landscape, la vie bohème traveled to the United States from the Parisian Latin Quarter in the 1850s. At first the province of small artistic coteries, Bohemia soon inspired a popular vogue, embodied in restaurants, clubs, neighborhoods, novels, poems, and dramatic performances across the country. Levin's study follows la vie bohème from its earliest expressions in the U.S. until its explosion in Greenwich Village in the 1910s. Although Bohemia was everywhere in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture, it has received relatively little scholarly attention. Bohemia in America, 1858–1920 fills this critical void, discovering and exploring the many textual and geographic spaces in which Bohemia was conjured. Joanna Levin not only provides access to a neglected cultural phenomenon but also to a new and compelling way of charting the development of American literature and culture.

Midnight Assassin

Midnight Assassin
Author: Patricia L. Bryan
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2007-08-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1587296055

On the night of December 1,1900, Iowa farmer John Hossack was attacked and killed while he slept at home beside his wife, Margaret. On April 11, 1901, after five days of testimony before an all-male jury, Margaret Hossack was found guilty of his murder and sentenced to life in prison. One year later, she was released on bail to await a retrial; jurors at this second trial could not reach a decision, and she was freed. She died August 25, 1916, leaving the mystery of her husband's death unsolved. The Hossack tragedy is a compelling one and the issues surrounding their domestic problems are still relevant today, Margaret's composure and stoicism, developed during years of spousal abuse, were seen as evidence of unfeminine behavior, while John Hossack--known to be a cruel and dangerous man--was hailed as a respectable husband and father. Midnight Assassin also introduces us to Susan Glaspell, a journalist who reported on the Hossack murder for the Des Moines Daily, who used these events as the basis for her classic short story, " A Jury of Her Peers", and the famous play Trifles. Based on almost a decade of research, Midnight Assassin is a riveting story of loneliness, fear, and suffering in the rural Midwest.