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The Great Heat Wave of 1896 and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt
Basic Books
August 2010
On Sale: July 27, 2010
304 pages ISBN: 0465013368 EAN: 9780465013364 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
One of the worst natural disasters in American history, the
1896 New York heat wave killed almost 1,500 people in ten
oppressively hot days. The heat coincided with a pitched
presidential contest between William McKinley and the
upstart Democrat William Jennings Bryan, who arrived in New
York City at the height of the catastrophe. As historian
Edward P. Kohn shows, Bryan’s hopes for the presidency began
to flag amidst the abhorrent heat just as a bright young
police commissioner named Theodore Roosevelt was scrambling
to mitigate the dangerously high temperatures by hosing down
streets and handing out ice to the poor. A vivid narrative that captures the birth of the progressive
era, Hot Time in the Old Town revives the forgotten disaster
that almost destroyed a great American city.
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