Olmsted’s greatest concern, however, was that the main, Jackson Park portion of the exposition simply was not fun. There is too much appearance of an impatient and tired doing of sight-seeing duty. A...
Oh, so many things swarmed in my thoughts, she wrote; and yet each time I was with him I felt the charm of his presence.
Off the southeast tip of Italy a young Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torped...
ONE MORNING IN AUGUST 1886, as heat rose from the streets with the intensity of a child’s fever,
Nowhere have I had such lovely friends as in Germany, she wrote. Looking back on it all is like seeing someone you love go mad—and do horrible things.
Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roof...
Neighbors turned surly; petty jealousies flared into denunciations made to the SA—the Storm Troopers—or to the newly founded Geheime Staatspolizei, only just becoming known by its acronym, Gestapo (GE...
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...
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...
In his last moments, she said, he had run his fingers over his bedding as if playing the piano. Do you hear that? he whispered. Isn’t it wonderful? That’s what I call music.
If there were a Pulitzer for bleak irony, however, it would go to the News for its Saturday-morning report on one of the most important local stories of the year—the Galveston count of the 1900 U.S. c...
If the British navy acted in response to every foretold movement of the German fleet, it risked revealing to Germany that its codes had been broken. In a secret internal memorandum, Admiral Oliver wro...
I was born with the devil in me,' [Holmes] wrote. 'I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.
I tell you we must have bodies. You cannot make doctors without them, and the public must understand it. If we can’t get them any other way we will arm the students with Winchester rifles and send the...
I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future, he wrote. In laying out Central Park we determined to think of no resul...
He recognized that the systemic malaise that caused it was a consequence in part of his own refusal over the years to limit his courtship of the finest wines, foods, and cigars.
He had only to assert the most commonplace thing and it sounded important and convincing.
Germany issued a proclamation designating the waters around the British Isles an area of war in which all enemy ships would be subject to attack without warning.
For now, the tension was subtle, a vibration, like the inaudible cry of overstressed steel.
Even the language used by Hitler and party officials was weirdly inverted. The term fanatical became a positive trait. Suddenly