He was a loner and intellectually intolerant.
He was a creature of the last turning of the centuries when sleep seemed to come more easily. Things were clear to him. He was loyal, a believer in dignity, honor, and effort.
He glanced back. Two images became impressed in his memory. One was of a collapsible lifeboat slipping from the ship, still sheathed in its protective cover; the other, of Captain Turner in full dress...
An all-swallowing wave, not unlike a surf comber on a beach, was rushing up the boat deck, enveloping passengers, boats, and everything that lay in its path, he wrote. A mass wail rose from those it e...
Would be no skipping and dancing. No heathen. The exposition was a dream city, but it was Burnham’s dream. Everywhere
Throughout America, who
Whether out of professional pique or some instinct of fear, the ship’s mascot—a cat named Dowie, after Captain Turner’s predecessor—fled the ship that night, for points unknown.
This prolonging of a man’s life doesn’t interest me when he’s done his work and has done it pretty well.
The city had laid miles and miles of streets and sewers through regions where perhaps one solitary house stood out alone,
The United States is remote, unconquerable, huge, without hostile neighbors or any neighbors at all of anything like her own strength, and lives exempt in an almost unvexed tranquility from the conten...
On August 3 a big Chicago bank, Lazarus Silverman, failed.
Jane Addams, the urban reformer who founded Chicago’s Hull House, wrote, Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permit...
It is, she wrote, an unfortunate trait in the human character to assail or asperse others engaged in the performance of humanitarian acts.
It amused him that women as a class were so wonderfully vulnerable, as if they believed that the codes of conduct that applied in their safe little hometowns, like Alva, Clinton, and Percy, might actu...
In this time when writing long letters was everyday practice, men of normal sensibility saw these cards as the most crabbed of media, little better than telegrams,
I was inclined to think him Jewish, she wrote; she considered his animus to be prompted only by his racial self-consciousness.
I must confess a shameful secret: I love Chicago best in the cold.
I didn’t believe all her stories, Martha wrote later. I thought she was exaggerating and a bit hysterical. When Martha left her hotel she witnessed no violence, saw no one cowering in fear, felt no op...
He died in his bed at his farm on February 9, 1940, at 3:10 p.m., with Martha and Bill Jr. at his side, his life work—his Old South—anything but finished.
He died angry, Chalmers said, because I didn’t believe him. Even in death he is emphatic and imperious.