Though the espionage and sedition laws were intended only as wartime measures, matters actually worsened with peace. The return home of two million job-seeking soldiers and the simultaneous dismantling of the wartime economy gave America a severe recession. Racial tensions erupted into riots in two dozen cities where blacks had moved in search of b

While building their empire, they also quietly but significantly changed the world. At a place called Turkey Ridge outside Cleveland

His first action on reelection was to set about removing all treasonous works from the city’s schools and libraries. Thompson appointed a theater owner and former billboard changer named Sport Hermann to purge the city’s institutions of any works that were less than “100 percent American.” Hermann appointed a body called the Patriots’ League to dec

a U-boat torpedoed the passenger liner Lusitania as it sailed in neutral waters off the Irish coast near Kinsale. The ship sank in just eighteen minutes, taking with it 1,200 people. A third of the victims were women and children; 128 of the dead were Americans whose country was not even at war. Outrage was immediate, but Germany made matters infin

they built a new town from scratch and called it Shaker Heights. Shaker Heights was the first planned dormitory community in America, and as such it became the model on which nearly all other suburbs were built.

Ford, it transpired, did not know much of anything. He could not say when the American Revolution was fought (“In 1812, I think; I’m not quite sure”) or quite what the issues were that provoked it. Questioned about politics, he conceded that he didn’t follow matters closely and had voted only once in his life. That was just after his twenty-first b

Things got worse. From St. Louis, Lindbergh flew to Dayton, Ohio, to visit Orville Wright, co-inventor of the airplane with his late brother Wilbur.

Oscar Hammerstein II also seemed to have come to the end of his road with Show Boat. He went a dozen years without a hit, but then he teamed up with Richard Rodgers and between them they put together the greatest run of successes in the history of musicals: Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, Flower Drum Song, and The Sound of Music

Hickox died because of a problem that hadn’t been fully thought through when Prohibition was introduced—namely, that alcohol is used for all kinds of things besides drinking. It was (and in many cases still remains) an essential ingredient in paint thinners, antifreezes, lotions, antiseptics, embalming fluid, and much more. Thus, it was necessary t