People seemed to believe that technology had stripped hurricanes of their power to kill. No hurricane expert endorsed this view.
Only holders of a cipher key could divine the underlying text, but possessing the codebooks made the whole process of solving the messages far simpler. To exploit these treasures the Admiralty establi...
One woman, Margaret Gwyer, a young newlywed from Saskatoon, Canada, was sucked into one of the ship’s 24-foot-wide funnels. Moments later an eruption of steam from below shot her back out, alive but c...
One study of Nazi records found that of a sample of 213 denunciations, 37 percent arose not from heartfelt political belief but from private conflicts, with the trigger often breathtakingly trivial. I...
One of the deadliest storm surges in American history occurred on Lake Okeechobee in Florida, in 1928, when hurricane winds blowing across the long fetch of the lake raised a storm surge that killed 1...
On March 30, 1890, an officer of the First National Bank placed a warning in the help-wanted section of the Chicago Tribune, to inform female stenographers of our growing conviction that no thoroughly...
On February 16, 1943, at 6:00 p.m., she was executed by guillotine. Her last words: And I have loved Germany so.
ONE MORNING IN AUGUST 1886, as heat rose from the streets with the intensity of a child’s fever,
OF THE LUSITANIA’S 1,959 PASSENGERS AND CREW, only 764 survived; the total of deaths was 1,195. The 3 German stowaways brought the total to 1,198. Of 33 infants aboard, only 6 survived. Over 600 passe...
Nor did the inquiry ever delve into why the Lusitania wasn’t diverted to the safer North Channel route, and why no naval escort was provided. Indeed, these are the great lingering questions of the Lus...
No one had forgotten how in 1885 fouled water had ignited an outbreak of cholera and typhoid that killed ten percent of the city’s population.
Nice days were still nice. The sun shines, wrote Christopher Isherwood in his Berlin Stories, and Hitler is the master of this city. The sun shines, and dozens of my friends … are in prison, possibly...
My travels took me as far north as Thorsminde, Denmark (in February no less); as far south as Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia; as far west as the Hoover Library at Stanford Un...
Margaret and James Shineman, newlyweds from Oil City, Wyoming, who suddenly found themselves aboard the fastest, most luxurious ship in service, for their journey to Scotland to visit Margaret’s famil...
Marconi recognized that with no revenue and no contracts and in the face of persistent skepticism, he needed more than ever to capture an ally of prominence and credibility. Through Fleming, however,...
MARTHA’S CHEERY VIEW of things was widely shared by outsiders visiting Germany and especially Berlin. The fact was that on most days in most neighborhoods the city looked and functioned as it always h...
Lauriat made his first trip in 1873 on one of Cunard’s earliest steamers, the Atlas. His purchases routinely made news. One acquisition, of a Bible dating to 1599, a Geneva, or Breeches, Bible—so name...
Later, Dodd wrote a description of Hitler in his diary. He is romantic-minded and half-informed about great historical events and men in Germany. He had a semi-criminal record. He has definitely said...
It could be done, because it had to be done
In the 1880s Chicago was experiencing explosive growth that propelled land values to levels no one could have imagined, especially within the downtown Loop, named for the turn-around loops of streetca...