Robert Weske

“Perhaps most surprising of all, the deposed and imprisoned King Henry was not murdered. This had been the fate of the two Plantagenet kings who had lost their crowns before him: Edward II died while in custody at Berkeley Castle in 1327, while Richard II was killed at Pontefract in 1400, the year following his deposition. Ironically, Henry’s survival was perhaps a mark of his uniquely pitiful and ineffectual approach to kingship—for it was much harder to justify killing a man who had done nothing evil or tyrannical, but had earned his fate thanks to his dewy-eyed simplicity. Permitting Henry to remain alive was a bold decision that Edward IV would come to regret. But in 1465 it must have struck the king as a brave and magnanimous act.”
― Dan Jones, The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors

“Germany’s gamble of early 1917 was to declare unlimited submarine warfare, making fair game almost any vessel headed for Allied ports—including those from a neutral country. Cutting off the Atlantic supply lines so crucial to the British and French war effort, the Germans hoped, would force the Allies to sue for peace. The danger of unlimited submarine warfare, of course, was that it was certain to sink American ships and kill American sailors, therefore sooner or later drawing the United States, the world’s largest economy, into the war. As reckless as this might seem, the German high command calculated that, even if the United States declared war, severing the Atlantic lifeline would strangle Britain and France into surrender in less than six months, long before a substantial number of American troops could be trained and sent to Europe. Despite its size the United States had a standing army that ranked only seventeenth in the world. In any case, how would American soldiers cross the ocean? German naval commanders were confident that U.S. troopships and merchant vessels alike would fall victim to U-boats, because Allied technology for locating submarines underwater was still so primitive as to be almost useless.”
― Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

“For thirty years from 1880 to 1910, the Chicago school of architects essentially designed the engineering and structural systems that have made possible the multistory buildings of today.”
― Emmett Dedmon, Fabulous Chicago: A Great City's History and People

“A radical, who stood on top of an abandoned piano to declare that the fire was the friend of the poor and urge the crowd to help itself to what it wanted, was suddenly quieted by a well-aimed whiskey bottle.”
― Emmett Dedmon, Fabulous Chicago: A Great City's History and People