During the summer of 1776, General George Washington knew that the city of New York had to be held. He also knew that the city could not be held. “Whoever commands the sea must command the town,” General Charles Lee wrote from New York earlier. By the end of June, the British commanded the sea.
From a vast fleet anchored off Staten Island, the largest expeditionary force in British history began landing thousands of regular troops and German mercenaries. Only days later, the Second Continental Congress formally declared independence. “The fate of unborn millions,” Washington wrote to his men, “will now depend on the courage and conduct of this army.” [Read more…] about Sudden and Violent: The Battle of Brooklyn
Although speculation about the end of the world has become a growth industry in recent decades, the first modern prediction of the Apocalypse was issued in Upstate New York during the 1830s by a mild-mannered farmer named William Miller.
The New York welcome is famous. Charles Lindbergh was paraded up Broadway under a deluge of ticker tape after flying the Atlantic solo in 1927. The Apollo 11 astronauts received an even grander reception 42 years later when they returned from the moon.
Baseball is our innocent pastime. Marked by stateliness and decorum, the game largely excludes the messiness and cruelty of the outside world. Saturday, July 25, 1959, was one of those rare occasions when history intruded on the grassy diamond. That evening, the simple game of pitching, hitting, and fielding became entangled with revolution, gunfire, and cold war politics.
Terrorism has been a grim feature of our time, but the tactic is far from new. 
Sixteen inches of snow in June. Killing frosts in August. The mystifying weather, known as eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death, swept the Northeast in 1816. Unbeknownst to those who suffered from it, the climactic quirk was the result of a volcanic eruption in the distant Dutch East Indies a year earlier.