Sublime

four thousand miles of roadless, trailless terrain through a landscape

This sort of discrimination and even dehumanization was already widespread, but, in Europe and its colonies, a few key differences lead to a unique analysis. Firstly, the concept of race was not consistently connected to heritability in Europe until the sixteenth century. Before then, it was generally assumed that traits like skin color were determ

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 w

So in August 1885, Kennedy arranged the sale of twenty thousand shares of Manitoba stock to the firm of Lee, Higginson, and Company, as agents for the Bostonians. The four associates—Hill, Kennedy, Smith, and Stephen—put up the stock for sale; soon after, Hill and Kennedy made similar purchases of Burlington stock. Marshall Field, who had never bee

“What do you mean by that: ‘the worse it gets’? Look here, George.” Man to man. Reason will prevail. If only we sit down and talk things over … “In the few weeks that we’ve worked together, this is what we’ve done. Eliminated overpopulation; restored the quality of urban life and the ecological balance of the planet. Eliminated cancer as a major ki

They had attained the top of the world, they thought. For Humboldt it was a supreme, indescribable moment. Nearly thirty years later, in 1828, when the surpassing magnitude of the Himalayas, long a subject of much conjecture, was verified by the first reliable instrument surveys, Humboldt was noticeably stunned. To a friend he wrote, “All my life I

It was that same summer of 1859, with the cornerstone in place, that he returned to Europe, accompanied by his wife, and it was in England the autumn following, in November, that On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection appeared, a volume bound in green cloth and priced at fifteen shillings. The first copy to reach Cambridge, one sent

Pacific Bill.” As it passed parliament in February 1881, the legislation authorized the Canadian Pacific Railroad to link with the Canada Central Railway at Callander, near Georgian Bay, and to run westward to some Pacific port in British Columbia. Generously subsidized with $25 million in direct support and a twenty-five-million-acre, checkerboard

I was expecting a wealth of amateur historians, with an encyclopedic knowledge of the fur trade and fresh insights to borrow, but the first twenty people I talked to had never heard of Joe Walker. Reading history books, it turned out, was not a popular