<p><span class="deck">On the theory that the greatest show is people, George Tilyou turned a rich man’s resort into a playground for the masses</span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> To become a successful local hero, get a good biographer and outlive your detractors</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"><span class="typestyle">Every March 17 on Fifth Avenue shamrocks bloom, bagpipes skirl, and colleens prance prettily along. Begorra, it’s a great day for the Irish!</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> Who runs the country? Administrative agencies. Who runs the administrative agencies? Well, there was this road they were going to put right through the old Rockefeller place, and …</span> </p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> “She is such a funny child, so old-fashioned, that we always call her ‘Granny’ “her mother said. Cousin Franklin felt otherwise</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> It started with jaunty confidence and skirling bagpipes. Five days later it had turned into one of the bloodiest and most futile battles ever fought on American soil.</span></span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> Carl Fisher thought Americans should be able to drive across their country, but it took a decade and a world war to finish his road</span> </p>
<p><span class="deck"> The happy meeting of a young matron and an extraordinary camera produced a memorable record of turn-of-the-century America</span> </p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> Would the great fighter come over for the Union? Italian freedom and lead troops Lincoln hoped so</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> No other impresario ever matched the record of the indomitable Max Maretzek in bringing new works and new stars to America</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> Besides being a bigot, a fop, and a thief, the British governor Lord Cornbury, had some peculiar fetishes</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> An exclusive preserve of New York’s social elite —its rise, its flourishing years, and its slide into genteel decline</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> When Theodore Roosevelt—Harvard-educated, dandified, and just twenty-three—arrived in Albany as an assemblyman in 1882, the oldpols dismissed him as a “Punkin-Lily,”and worse. They were in for a shock.</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> Her life preservers weighted with scrap-iron, her lifeboats mere decoration, the excursion steamer General Slocum left New York’s Third Street pier at 9:30 on the morning of June 15,1904, with thirteen-hundred picknickers bound for a Long Island beach. Less than an hour later, she was afire.</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> How a young New York society matron named Alice Shaw dazzled English royalty with her extraordinary embouchure</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> If he’d been the closest companion of the president of IBM, you might happen across his name in a privately printed memoir. But LeMoyne Billings was John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s best friend from Choate to the White House—and that makes him part of history.</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> The great tenor came to America in 1903, and it was love at first sight—a love that survived an earthquake and some trouble with the police about a woman at the zoo</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> Today more Americans live in them than in city and country combined. How did we get there?</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> The largest Gothic cathedral in the Western Hemisphere has the strangest stained-glass windows in the world</span> </span></p>