Sublime

The United States Army Corps of Engineers has its Chicago District headquarters in a Classical Revival building on LaSalle Street. A plaque outside the building explains that it was the site of the General Time Convention of 1883, held to sync the country’s clocks. The process involved pruning dozens of regional time zones down to four, which, in

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Agassiz produced a stream of articles for Atlantic Monthly and carried the fight to the lecture circuit, his popularity soaring to new heights. The articles, published as a book, Methods of Study in Natural History, went through nineteen editions. To know that Agassiz of Harvard decried the theories of Charles Darwin, that he, of all learned men,

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Scurvy was common on longer voyages. Lind was all too aware of the single worst incident, as it had happened just seven years earlier. The navy had dispatched a squadron of eight ships under the command of Sir George Anson to attack Spanish galleons in South America. Three and a half years later, Anson returned with a treasure so vast, he needed

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