Quotes from Erik Larson

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 actually still apply once they had left behind their dusty, kerosene-scented parlors and set out on their own.

Stand with your back to the wind," he said, "and the barometer will be lower on your left than on your right.

Franke writes, "We do know that Holmes advertised his 'hotel' as a suitable lodging for visitors to the world's fair; that no fewer than fifty persons, reported to the police as missing, were traced to the Castle; and that there their trail ended" (109). Schechter: "No one can say exactly how many fairgoers Holmes lured to the Castle between May and October 1893, though he appears to have filled the place to capacity on most nights

why were the State Department and President Roosevelt so hesitant to express in frank terms how they really felt about Hitler at a time when such expressions clearly could have had a powerful effect on his prestige in the world?

To produce the kind of landscape effects Olmsted strived to create required not months but years, even decades. I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future, he wrote. In laying out Central Park we determined to think of no result to be realized in less than forty years.

But things were changing. Everywhere one looked the boundary between the moral and the wicked seemed to be degrading. Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued in favor of divorce. Clarence Darrow advocated free love. A young woman named Borden killed her parents.

In the time of the fair the rate at which men and women killed one another rose sharply throughout the nation but especially in Chicago, where police found themselves without the manpower or expertise to manage the volume. In the first six months of 1892 the city experienced nearly eight hundred violent deaths. Four a day. Most were prosaic, arising from robbery, argument, or sexual jealousy. Men shot women, women shot men, and children shot one another by accident.

The men lived for the moment the boat ascended to the surface and the hatch in the conning tower was opened. "The first breath of fresh air, the open conning-tower hatch and the springing into life of the Diesels, after fifteen hours on the bottom, is an experience to be lived through," said another commander, Martin Niemöller.

At one point during the Holmes investigation Chicago's chief of police told a Tribune reporter he'd just as soon have a squad of reporters under his command as detectives.

One portion of the lakefront, named Burnham Park in his honor, contains Soldier Field and the Field Museum, which he designed.

He added: "With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.

As I look back on those days, most people in Chicago felt that way. Chicago was host to the world at that time and we were part of it all.

In an analogy that would prove all too apt, Max Weber likened the city to "a human being with his skin removed.

I had started with nothing, and if I now found myself with nothing, I was at least even. Actually, I was much better than even: I had had a wonderful time.

But Zimmermann surprised him. On Friday, March 2, during a press conference, Zimmermann himself confirmed that he had sent the telegram. "By admitting the truth," Lansing wrote, "he blundered in a most astounding manner for a man engaged in international intrigue. Of course the message itself was a stupid piece of business, but admitting it was far worse.

There began to appear before my romantic eyes...a vast and complicated network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape.

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 as possible, to cripple the World's Fair.

In conclusion," he said, "one may safely say that it would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of history to realize that no system which implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse.

General Electric rather miraculously came back with a bid of $554,000. But Westinghouse, whose AC system was inherently cheaper and more efficient, bid $399,000. The exposition went with Westinghouse, and helped change the history of electricity.

through the hull—the rush of water past a prow, the thrum of propellers.

Koerver reports another example of delusional thinking within the German navy. Adm. Edouard von Capelle said, on Feb. 1, 1917, "From a military point of view I rate the effect of America coming on the side of our enemies as nil." Tuchman, Zimmermann Telegram, 139; Koerver, German Submarine Warfare, xxxiii.

THE DATE WAS APRIL 14, 1912, a sinister day in maritime history, but of course the man in suite 63–65, shelter deck C, did not yet know it.

Her blind endorsement of Hitler's regime first faded to a kind of sympathetic skepticism, but as summer approached

that I ventured as far as my position would allow and by historical analogy warned men as solemnly as possible against half-educated leaders being permitted to lead nations into war.