The war began with the geopolitical equivalent of a brush fire.
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 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 important effect of all this was to leave the determination as to which ships were to be spared, which to be sunk, to the discretion of individual U-boat commanders. Thus a lone submarine cap...
The list of appetizers included stuffed eagles’ eggs.
The fair awakened America to beauty and as such was a necessary passage that laid the foundation for men like Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. For Burnham personally the fair had been...
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 city’s legions of working men disagreed. They always had counted Harrison as one of their own, Our Carter, even though he was a plantation-reared Kentucky man who had gone to Yale, spoke fluent Fr...
The bureau had long banned the use of the word tornado because it induced panic, and panic brought criticism, something the bureau could ill afford.
The bells on the streetcars ring, buses clatter by honking their horns, stuffed full with people and more people; taxis and fancy private automobiles hum over the glassy asphalt, he wrote. The fragran...
The article called Dodd a small, dry, nervous, pedantic man … whose appearance at diplomatic and social functions inevitably called forth yawning boredom.
The Lusitania remained a passenger liner, but with the hull of a battleship.
That un-American institution, the trades union, has developed its un-American principle of curtailing or abolishing the personal freedom of the individual in a new direction, that of seeking, as far a...
Such peaceful intervals never lasted long.
Strange things began to happen that made Holmes’s claims about being the devil seem almost plausible. Detective Geyer became seriously ill. The warden of Moyamensing prison committed suicide. The jury...
So many men … think absolute isolation a coming paradise.
Snow fell. Carolers moved among the mansions of Prairie Avenue, pausing now and then to enter the fine houses for hot mulled cider and cocoa. The air was scented with woodsmoke and roasting duck. In G...
Outside the White House, Wilson’s many notes to Germany and their replies became the target of wry humor, as when one editor wrote: Dear Kaiser: In spite of previous correspondence on the subject anot...
One soldier in the Ypres Salient, at Messines, Belgium, wrote of the frustration of the trench stalemate. We are still in our old positions, and keep annoying the English and French. The weather is mi...
One of those who canceled citing illness was Lady Cosmo Duff-Gordon, a fashion designer who had survived the sinking of the Titanic. Another designer, Philip Mangone, canceled for unspecified reasons....