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....
One can evade a danger that one recognizes,' wrote historian Friedrich Zipfel, 'but a police working in the dark becomes uncanny. Nowhere does one feel safe from it. While not omnipresent, it could ap...
Of the four men in Preston Prichard’s cabin, D-90, only one survived, his friend Arthur Gadsden. Prichard’s body was never recovered, yet in the red volume that now contains the beautifully archived r...
No realm was too petty: The Ministry of Posts ruled that henceforth when trying to spell a word over the telephone a caller could no longer say D as in David, because David was a Jewish name. The call...
No one could bear the idea of the White City lying empty and desolate. A Cosmopolitan writer said, Better to have it vanish suddenly, in a blaze of glory, than fall into gradual disrepair and dilapida...
Neurath saw himself as a sobering force in the government and believed he could help control Hitler and his party. As one peer put it, He was trying to train the Nazis and turn them into really servic...
Neurath asked Dodd whether the United States did not have a Jewish problem of its own. You know, of course, Dodd said, that we have had difficulty now and then in the United States with Jews who had g...
My darling atheist, she recalled telling him, why do you help me decorate a Christmas tree to celebrate the birth of Christ? He laughed. This isn’t for Christians or for Christ, liebes Kind, he said,...
Minneapolis was small, somnolent, and full of Swedish and Norwegian farmers as charming as cornstalks.
Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood.Daniel H. Burnham
Lusitania, after a Roman province on the Iberian Peninsula that occupied roughly the same ground as modern-day Portugal. The inhabitants were warlike, and the Romans conquered them with great difficul...
Klemperer detected a certain hysteria of language in the new flood of decrees, alarms, and intimidation—This perpetual threatening with the death penalty!—and in strange, inexplicable episodes of para...
In this day before sonar, a submarine traveled utterly blind, trusting entirely in the accuracy of sea charts. One great fear of all U-boat men was that a half-sunk derelict or an uncharted rock might...
In a conversation with a British embassy official that occurred at about this time, quoted in a memorandum later filed with the foreign office in London, Diels delivered a monologue on his own moral u...
Holmes was charming and gracious, but something about him made Belknap uneasy. He could not have defined it. Indeed, for the next several decades alienists and their successors would find themselves h...
He praised Hitler as the man who has pulled his people from moral and economic despair into the state of pride and evident prosperity they now enjoyed. He particularly admired the Nazi Strength throug...
Ferris, himself fed up with construction delays and Burnham’s pestering, had told Gronau to turn the wheel or tear it off the tower.
Ferris had created more than simply an engineering novelty. Like the inventors of the elevator, he had conjured an entirely new physical sensation.
Families learned of the deaths of kin mostly by telegram, but some knew or sensed their loss even when no telegram brought the news. Husbands and wives had promised to write letters or send cables to...
Chicago shrugged the sniping off. Big was big. Success today would dispel at last the eastern perception that Chicago was nothing more than a greedy, hog-slaughtering backwater; failure would bring hu...