Sublime

It was at Harpers Ferry that the abolitionist John Brown decided to liberate America’s slaves and set up a new nation of his own in northwestern Virginia, which was a pretty ambitious undertaking considering that he had an army of just twenty-one people. To that end, on October 16, 1859, he and his little group stole into town under cover of

Shortly before the Hammonds’ arrival the building’s East Portico had been the scene of an assassination attempt against President Andrew Jackson. The assailant was named Richard Lawrence, who believed himself to be England’s long-dead King Richard III and claimed that Jackson had interfered with the delivery of payments long owed to him by the

Andy Jackson and Abe Lincoln!”

“The modest and cordial young fellow who passed through New York a few weeks ago with his mother will never be known outside the circle of his mourning friends,” commented John Hay in a touching obituary written for the New York Tribune. “But ’little Tad’ will be remembered as long as any live who bore a personal share in the great movements whose

Hemingway wrote Perkins from Oak Park that his father had shot himself, leaving a wife, six children, and “damned little money.” His father was the parent Hemingway really cared about. From that day forward his relationship with Perkins deepened. Max became the solid, trustworthy older man in Hemingway’s turbulent life, someone to turn to and rely

Mark explains that Jackson’s the greatest president America has ever had, that he was ruthless, a populist and an individualist, and that he “got

August 1876, and Walker died two months later. He was seventy-seven years old. The cause of death, says Bil Gilbert, was nothing more or less than ‘having lived long enough’. How to distil that life into six lines, containing