On June 16, 1937, Mr. William I. Sirovich, New York Representative, introduced a joint resolution “providing for the declaration of a National Slum Clearance Day by the President of the United States” to the Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary in Washington D.C. This short bill was designed to empower both the President and the nation to realize the state of affairs currently affecting...
Edgar Allan Poe spent his final months in poverty, tormented by grief, drowning his depression in alcohol and poetry. In May 1849, in his small New York cottage, he wrote what was to be his last completed poem, “Annabel Lee,” in which he returned to the themes that had haunted him for much of his life. The poem, set long ago in a kingdom by the sea, describes the speaker’s undying love for the...
Charles Furman had known Fannie Garden for only 13 days before he asked her to marry him. In all, they spent less than a month together before the Confederate government ordered him northward to fight the “soulless soldiers” of the “despised Yankee Nation." The letters they wrote in the years that followed captured both their own deepening love and the chaos and carnage of the American Civil...