"It was a time, wrote Sen. Chauncey Depew, one of the most prominent politicians of the age, when the average American felt 'four-hundred-percent bigger' than the year before." (Introduction, page 5)

"William Jennings Bryan stumped for the presidency and railed at America's new imperialist bent, in particular the widely held belief that expansion overseas was American's destiny. 'Destiny,' he thundered, 'is the subterfuge of the invertebrate. . . .'" (Part I, page 27)

"Columbus had learned that the seas of the New World were both seductive and deadly, but in the process had become adept at reading the tropical skies for signs of trouble." (Part I, page 40)

"Travelers arriving by ship saw the city as a silvery fairy kingdom that might just as suddenly disappear from sight, a very different portrait from that which would present itself in the last few weeks of September 1900, when inbound passengers smelled the pyres of...