<p><span class="deck"> Everyone from presidents to swindlers sailed the Sound on “Mammoth Palace Steamers” in the heyday of the sidewheelers</span> </p>
<p><span class="deck">John Roebling lost his life and his son lost his health, but after sixteen years the incredible Brooklyn Bridge was finished</span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> Maria Monk’s lurid “disclosures” and Samuel Morse’s dire warnings launched a crusade of bigotry that almost won the White House</span> </p>
<p><span class="deck">In a day of rampant money-making, gentle Peter Cooper was not only a reformer but successful, widely loved, and rich.</span> </p>
<p><span class="deck">New York received the great composer like a god; he responded <span class="typestyle"> con brio</span> to its shiny gadgets and beautiful women and produced an “American” opera.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> Flags flew and champagne flowed when the Czar’s ships anchored in New York Harbor. Fifty years later we learned the reason for their surprise visit</span> </p>
<p><span class="deck"> Columbia College presented a peaceful exterior in 1788, but inside its medical laboratories something strange was going on; and under cover of darkness freshly interred bodies were disappearing from nearby burying grounds</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"> <span class="typestyle"> The old gray mare was not the ecological marvel, in American cities, that horse lovers like to believe</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> Ever since 1792, bulls and bears together have tripped the light fantastic on Wall Street’s sidewalks—and sometimes just tripped</span> </p>
<p><span class="deck"><span class="typestyle">Thus Boss Richard Croker breezily dismissed charges of corruption. But the fortune he made from “honest graft” was not enough to buy him what he most wanted</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck">How a champagne picnic on Monument Mountain led to a profound revision of <span class="typestyle">Moby Dick</span> — and disenchantment</span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> “It is needless,” wrote his publisher, “to say anything of the writer of ‘Maple Leaf,’ ‘Cascades,’ ‘Sunflower’ or ‘Entertainer.’ You know him.” But this black genius died penniless and all but forgotten</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> Miriam Follin had a penchant for diamonds, the demimonde, and the dramatic. She also possessed the business acumen to become one of America’s leading publishers in the nineteenth century</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"> said a New York newspaper when the Metropolitan opened its American Wing in 1924. This spring, a new, grander American Wing once again displays the collection that Lewis Mumford found “not merely an exhibition of art,” but “a pageant of American history.”</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> Americans don’t hesitate to say anything they please about a public performance. But the right to do so wasn’t established until the Cherry Sisters sued a critic who didn’t like their appalling vaudeville act.</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> J<span class="typestyle"> ohn Wenrich’s original drawings of Rockefeller Center helped attract tenants in the middle of the Depression. Fifty years later they survive as talismans of a golden moment in American architecture</span> . </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> The city has been a lure for millions, but most of the great American minds have been appalled by its excesses. Here an eminent observer, who knows firsthand the city’s threat, surveys the subject.</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"><span class="typestyle">They could hardly have been more temperamentally incompatible, but the Midwestern writer Willa Cather and the crusading editor S. S. McClure enjoyed a splendid working relationship for six years and a lifetime of mutual respect</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> The ceaseless clatter of cheap pianos from a mid-Manhattan side street was once music to all America</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> A gathering of little-known drawings from Columbia<br />
University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library illuminates two centuries of American building</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck">One of the country’ more bizzarre labor disputes pitted a crowed of outraged newsboys against two powerful opponents: Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolf Hearst.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">American art was hardly more than a cultural curiosity in the early years of this century. Now, it is among the world’s most influential, and much of the credit belongs to a self-made woman named Juliana Force.</span></p>
<p>He excelled at business and made Macy's highly profitable. But Nathan Straus was even better at giving away his earnings to help people in need.</p>
