Sublime

William Keeling,

McKinley, meanwhile, called for 125,000 volunteers to carry the war to the Caribbean. The army was swamped with applicants. And bouncing up and down enthusiastically at the head of the line was one Theodore Roosevelt, assistant secretary of the navy. Roosevelt’s eagerness to leave his post and join the army baffled his friends. “Is his wife dead?

Under Wilson, the United States intervened in Latin America more often than at any other time in our history. We landed troops in Mexico in 1914, Haiti in 1915, the Dominican Republic in 1916, Mexico again in 1916 (and nine more times before the end of Wilson’s presidency), Cuba in 1917, and Panama in 1918.

In the company of a young French medical doctor turned botanist, Aime Bonpland, Humboldt had departed from La Coruña, Spain, in June 1799, on a Spanish frigate, slipping past a British blockade in the dark of night, in the midst of a storm, and carrying with him a unique document from the Spanish government. He and Bonpland had been granted

Convinced by Progressives, the spiritual heirs of the People’s Party, that the first bill was not sufficient, Roosevelt sent up another. “I ask the Congress for specific legislation relating to the mortgage and other forms of indebtedness of the farmers of the nation,” he said. The proposed legislation was revolutionary in concept; it would use

“Money has been the oil that has kept the wheels of society turning and allowed the complexity of our present civilization to develop, but credit, the centralized creation of money, interest, and particularly compound interest, have seriously destabilized the relationship between money and the goods and services, or wealth, it originally

In all the surviving accounts in which those who knew Louis Agassiz strive to describe and explain the hold he had on his time, the enthusiasm he generated, his charm and powers as expositor and leader, one theme remains constant: the quality of the man’s commitment. Silliman used the word engaged. William James told a story. James had been a

That same morning Henry Flagler, now eighty-two, left his home, Whitehall, in Palm Beach. He was frail and his sight was failing, but nothing was about to stop him. Not after spending $12 million on a series of hotels, $18 million on his land-based railroad, and another $20 million or more on his “railroad across the sea.” On this day he would