If the reformers had looked at the Battle of the Battery Crossing in a broader perspective, however, they would have been holding not a “Victory Luncheon” but a wake. For in such a perspective—the significance of the battle in the history of New York City—the key point about the fight and its significance for the city’s future was not that the Pres

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As with temperatures, sea levels have in the past varied dramatically. At the end of the Wisconsin, as the great ice sheets were breaking up, there were periods when they rose at the astonishing rate of a foot a decade. (It’s been proposed that one of these “meltwater pulses” inspired the account of the deluge in Genesis.) Obviously, our ancestors

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