Sublime

The practical methodologies evolved over many years, and were largely the work of John Hall, a gunsmith from Portland, Maine, and inventor of the “Hall carbine” that became notorious when muckrakers dug into the youthful Pierpont Morgan’s dealings with Civil War procurement authorities.

Throughout the 1950s, Havana served as “a hedonistic playground for the world’s elite,” filled with gambling joints, jazz, and brothels, moneyed by the mob, politicians, and aristocrats. The playwright Arthur Miller described Batista’s Cuba in The Nation as “hopelessly corrupt, a Mafia playground, [and] a bordello for Americans and other

“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but by blood”—his last words before execution were recorded, and, as has often been noted, they were prophetic. But they were also only partly true. Certain crimes were ceased by the Civil War, but they have not been purged. Not yet. Harpers Ferry is

Storer—which, according to the exhibition signage, was one of three historically Black colleges in West Virginia—was closed after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. Its Blackness violated the prohibition of segregation. The other two are still open today, but have tiny numbers of Black students in attendance.

In 1857, Scientific American specified the minimum machinery for a one-hundred-acre farm as “a combined reaper and mower, a horse rake, a seed planter and a mower, a thresher and grain cleaner; portable grist mill, a corn sheller, a horse power, three harrows, roller, [and] two cultivators . . .” But it’s much harder to relate Armory mechanization

On February 27, 1792, bowing to the inevitable, Jefferson terminated L’Enfant’s services. Washington ended up feeling bitter toward L’Enfant for his imperious treatment of the commissioners. Nevertheless, the broad strokes of L’Enfant’s design for Washington, D.C., left their imprint on the city. As John Adams concluded years later, “Washington,

In November 1943, Rear Admiral John Hall took command of the 11th Amphibious Force and assumed the responsibility for depositing the Army’s Fifth Corps on the landing site designated as Omaha Beach—nothing less than the most important operation in American history.