Where Room 40 promised to give Britain the clearest advantage was in the battle for control of the seas, and there Britain’s strategy had undergone a change.
We were still looking upon war in the light of Victorian and previous wars, Morton wrote later, adding that he and his brother had failed to appreciate that the nature and method of war had changed fo...
Wasplike with their long slender hulls, these were ships not seen in these waters before. They approached in a line, each flying a large American flag. To the hundreds of onlookers by now gathered on...
Unmistakable and invulnerable, a floating village in steel, the Lusitania glided by in the night as a giant black shadow cast upon the sea.
Turner, that day, was master of one of the great greyhounds of the North Atlantic—and looked the part.
Tolerance means weakness, Eicke wrote in the introduction to his rules. In the light of this conception, punishment will be mercilessly handed out whenever the interests of the fatherland warrant it.
Time lost can never be recovered...and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere.
They tasted a new snack called Cracker Jack and a new breakfast food called Shredded Wheat.
These were men, wrote Lincoln Steffens, who will not have an office unless it is up where the air is cool and fresh, the outlook broad and beautiful, and where there is silence in the heart of busines...
There were parents sailing to rejoin their children, and children to rejoin their parents, and wives and fathers hoping to get back to their own families, as was the case with Mrs. Arthur Luck of Worc...
The dedication had been anticipated nationwide. Francis J. Bellamy, an editor of Youth’s Companion, thought it would be a fine thing if on that day all the schoolchildren of America, in unison, offere...
TO DODD, PAPEN’S REMARK ranked as one of the most idiotic he had heard since his arrival in Berlin. And he had heard many. An odd kind of fanciful thinking seemed to have bedazzled Germany, to the hig...
THE THING THAT ENTRANCED ME about Chicago in the Gilded Age was the city’s willingness to take on the impossible in the name of civic honor, a concept so removed from the modern psyche that two wise r...
THE FAIR HAD A POWERFUL and lasting impact on the nation’s psyche, in ways both large and small. Walt Disney’s father, Elias, helped build the White City; Walt’s Magic Kingdom may well be a descendant...
THE ADMIRALTY’S focus was elsewhere, on a different ship that it deemed far more valuable.
Starting in 1897, Henry Havelock Ellis devoted six volumes to it: his pioneering Studies in the Psychology of Sex, sprinkled with case studies of unexpected explicitness and perversity. One memorable...
She was one of America’s few female architects of stature, designer of a revered house in Farmington, which she named Hill-Stead.
She eventually adopted the gold collar and married a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Wallace Riddle. She achieved her goal of creating a progressive boys’ school as a memorial to her late fathe...
She and a friend joked about what to do if the ship were attacked. Our stewardess laughed, Mrs. Lines recalled, and said we would not go down, but up, as we were well loaded with munitions.
Seagulls dove among corpses and survivors alike. Turner later told his son, Norman, that he found himself fending off attacks by the birds, which swooped from the sky and pecked at the eyes of floatin...