A boutonniere rested beside each plate. Everyone wore tuxedos. There was not a woman in sight.
A battle followed, fought in true Gilded Age fashion with oblique snubs and poisonous courtesy.
There existed a widespread, if naive, belief that war of the kind that had convulsed Europe in past centuries had become obsolete—that the economies of nations were so closely connected with one anoth...
Most likely explanation is that there was indeed a plot, however imperfect, to endanger the Lusitania in order to involve the United States in the war.
A new beer did well, winning the exposition’s top beer award. Forever afterward, its brewer called it Pabst Blue Ribbon.
Why in the midst of great events there always seems to be a family so misnamed is one of the imponderables of history.
Using Holmes’s instructions, workmen in the employ of undertaker John J. O’Rourke filled a coffin with cement, then placed Holmes’s body inside and covered it with more cement. They hauled him south t...
Upon learning that Hall was the man who had invented the typewriter she used so often, the girl put her arms around his neck and gave him a huge hug and kiss. Forever afterward, whenever Hall told thi...
Under Stalin, peasants had been forced into vast collectives. Many resisted, and an estimated five million people—men, women, and children—simply disappeared, many shipped off to far-flung work camps.
Torpedoes were expensive, and heavy. Each cost up to $ 5,000— over $ 100,000 today— and weighed over three thousand pounds, twice the weight of a Ford Model T.
Throughout that first year in Germany, Dodd had been struck again and again by the strange indifference to atrocity that had settled over the nation, the willingness of the populace and of the moderat...
They tasted a new snack called Cracker Jack and a new breakfast food called Shredded Wheat.
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 thing that weighed on him most, however, was the irrationality of the world in which he now found himself. To some extent he was a prisoner of his own training. As a historian, he had come to view...
The ranks included a carpenter and furniture-maker named Elias Disney, who in coming years would tell many stories about the construction of this magical realm beside the lake. His son Walt would take...
The next year, in March 1888, her parents sent her to Philadelphia, to be examined and cared for by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, a physician famous for treating patients, mainly women, suffering from neur...
The most terrifying part of battle was the exit from a trench—standing up and climbing out, knowing that the opposing force would at that moment unleash a fusillade that would continue until the offen...
The first submarine ever credited with sinking an enemy ship was the Confederate navy’s H. L. Hunley, which, during the American Civil War, sank the Union navy’s frigate, the Housatonic. The Hunley, p...
The disaster had an important secondary effect: because two of the cruisers had stopped to help survivors of the initial attack and thus made themselves easy targets, the Admiralty issued orders forbi...
The company had a remarkable safety record: not a single passenger death from sinking, collision, ice, weather, fire, or any other circumstance where blame could be laid upon captain or company,