That you have found me … among so many millions is the miracle of our time! he cried. And that I have found you, that is Germany’s fortune!
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 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...
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.
Roosevelt understood that the political costs of any public condemnation of Nazi persecution or any obvious effort to ease the entry of Jews into America were likely to be immense, because American po...
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 poll found that 41 percent of those contacted believed Jews had too much power in the United States; another found that one-fifth wanted to drive Jews out of the United States. (
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...
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...
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...
Mowrer and his family made it safely to Tokyo. His wife, Lillian, recalled her great sorrow at having to leave Berlin. Nowhere have I had such lovely friends as in Germany, she wrote. Looking back on...
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...
It’s a great privilege to be permitted to share any part of your thought and confidence. It puts me in spirits again and makes me feel as if my private life had been recreated. But, better than that,...
It is true that in this time people set their faces hard for photographs, partly from custom, partly because of deficits in photographic technology, but this crowd might not have smiled for the better...
In laying out Central Park we determined to think of no result to be realized in less than forty years.
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...