Sublime

Along with the invigorated stature of public officials, security concerns created heroes among firefighters and law enforcement officers, who suddenly achieved a newly exalted stature.

Even today, experts presume that it would take a minimum of twenty-four hours to evacuate the Keys, and that is with a major highway running from Miami to Key West, two access bridges linking Key Largo to the mainland, and a carefully networked system of civil defense and sophisticated early-warning systems in place, none of which existed on that

The appeal of the Keys as an exotic destination had only been bolstered by their newfound accessibility, so much so that Franklin Roosevelt had thought it a worthy expenditure of WPA funds to complete a highway link between Grassy Key and the Matecumbes, thereby making it even easier for Americans to find a part of paradise for themselves. What

the veil lifted. Is that where the “lazy white Southerner” stereotype came from? Is that why Southern whites looked funny—lanky, pale, and slack? Page introduced Stiles to John D. Rockefeller’s aide, who arranged for the oil baron to give a million dollars to deworm the South. This was an early venture by Rockefeller into philanthropy, which would

In 1904 a massive fire ravaged Baltimore. Engine companies sped from New York, Philadelphia, Annapolis, Wilmington, and Harrisburg to help. Yet there was little they could do, for when they arrived, they found that their hoses couldn’t connect to Baltimore’s hydrants (or, indeed, to one another’s hoses). For thirty helpless hours they watched as

It was, after all, the middle of what historians have termed the “Gilded Age” of American history, a period that stretched from the end of the Civil War until the Great Crash of 1929, marked by unbounded industrial growth and prosperity, and an optimism that was barely dimmed by World War