The Games We Played: The Golden Age of Board & Table Games

You won't find Monopoly or Scrabble here, but rather The Popular Game of Broadway and Soldier Ten Pins. But some of the other names will be familiar in this vividly illustrated collection of late 19th-century and early 20th-century games in the collection of the New-York Historical Society: Milton Bradley (producer of, among others, Anagrams and Other Letter Games) and Parker Brothers (who produced What's His Name, a quiz game about famous men). This fascinating look at games past is not all play: Jackson, president of the Historical Society and a historian at Columbia, posits that games reflect the social concerns of their times, and illuminating captions offer bite-size lessons in social history.