Sublime

For three months they explored and mapped the coastal plain, collecting some sixteen hundred plants—palms, orchids, grasses, bamboos—among which they were able to identify six hundred new species. They witnessed a total eclipse, an earthquake, and, on a night in November, a spectacular meteor shower that went on for hours. They paddled up the Apure

get out of my door,” Bessie Smith lamented in “Backwater Blues.” In response to the “great flood,” Congress in effect nationalized flood control along the Mississippi and entrusted the work to the Army Corps of Engineers. Joseph Ransdell, Louisiana’s senior U.S. senator at the time, called the Flood Control Act of 1928 the most important piece of

All told they spent nearly two years in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. From Bogotá they went over the Andes on foot, picking the more difficult of two possible routes. They were in the Andes, crossing and recrossing, from September 1801 until October 1802, and they must have made a picturesque caravan, with their guides and mules and scientific

Moreover, Civic Biology was a monstrously racist text, which ranked humanity in five categories of evolutionary development (with blacks at the bottom and whites at the top), advocated eugenic cleansing of the race, denounced intermarriage and the perpetuation of ‘degenerate’ stock and suggested ‘humane’ steps for the elimination of social

The major discovery produced by the survey was a gap in the mountains some thirteen miles from Panama City that was only 275 feet above sea level. This was a good two hundred feet lower than what heretofore had been the lowest known pass at Panama, and, as further explorations and further surveys would verify, it was, except for one at Nicaragua,

And finally, there was the nearby Springfield Armory, the nerve center of the American military’s drive toward high-technology weapon-making. Ironically, the blueprint for the armory came from the industrially laggard French, with the help of that most committed of pastoralists, Thomas Jefferson. After the American Revolution, Frenchmen helped

Dr. Albert Ringier and General Fitzroy both lived into their eighties and saw the completion of the…

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