Sublime

In early 1904, when Henry Morrison Flagler made his fateful decision to begin the building of the Overseas Railroad, he was already seventy-four, and, in the eyes of most, was nearing the end of a second successful career. Certainly the drive to make money had little to do with his decisions in those days, even if money, or the lack of it, had been

I knew of Rumsfeld’s interest in Pearl Harbor. He greeted me with a photocopy of the foreword to a remarkable book, Roberta Wohlstetter’s 1962 Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, which outlined the myriad reasons why the Japanese attack had been such a surprise to our military and intelligence officers. Worse than being unprepared, we had mistaken

Harpers.

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 m

“So we had won after all!” Churchill remembered exulting on getting the news from Hawaii. “[T]he United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death.” “[S]illy people” had thought Americans too soft, too talkative, too paralyzed by their politics to be anything more than “a vague blur on the horizon to friend or foe.” But I had studied

Thus, while Shackleton was undeniably out of place, even inept, in a great many everyday situations, he had a talent—a genius, even—that he shared with only a handful of men throughout history—genuine leadership. He was, as one of his men put it, “the greatest leader that ever came on God’s earth, bar none.” For all his blind spots and inadequacies