In his dispatches Messersmith reprised one theme again and again: how impossible it was for casual visitors to understand what was really happening in this new Germany. The Americans coming to Germany...
In Calumet a thousand ornate streetlamps stood in a swamp, where they did nothing but ignite the fog and summon auras of mosquitoes.
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...
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.
Holmes cast himself as a demanding contractor. As workers came to him for their wages, he berated them for doing shoddy work and refused to pay them, even if the work was perfect. They quit, or he fir...
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 became one of the few voices in U.S. government to warn of the true ambitions of Hitler
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.
Ferris had nearly gotten it right. In that single day 713,646 people had paid to enter Jackson Park. (Only 31,059—four percent—were children.) Another 37,380 visitors had entered using passes, bringin...
Eventually she would have an affair with Thomas Wolfe when the writer visited Berlin; Wolfe would tell a friend later that she was like a butterfly hovering around my penis.
Even the language used by Hitler and party officials was weirdly inverted. The term fanatical became a positive trait. Suddenly
Contrary to the predictions of many students of international problems, I feel fairly certain that we shall not have war in the near future.
Chicago has disappointed her enemies and astonished the world
Boswell and Thompson write, Every night the rooms on the two upper floors of the Castle were filled to overflowing. Holmes reluctantly accommodated a few men as paying guests, but catered primarily to...
At the Quebec prison, he had read Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope, then had autographed the book and given it to a guard for a souvenir.
As the firm grew, so did the city. It got bigger, taller, and richer; but it also grew dirtier, darker, and more dangerous. A miasma of cinder-flecked smoke blackened its streets and at times reduced...
As the crowd thundered, a man eased up beside a thin, pale woman with a bent neck. In the next instant Jane Addams realized her purse was gone. The great fair had begun.
Another raid followed on January 31, during which nine airships flew as far as Liverpool, along the way sending terrifying shadows scudding across the landscape of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
Although her book did include compelling recipes for scrapple, ox cheek, and baked calf’s head and tips for the preparation of raccoon, possum, snipe, plovers, and blackbirds (for blackbird pie) and h...