Lewis Lapham

“Oh, murder!” said British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval as he stumbled and fell.

When Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office on Air Force One, he made sure that at his side was President Kennedy’s widow, Jacqueline, still in her blood- stained pink suit.

On New Year’s Eve 1862, black churches in the northern states were crammed with praying, singing congregations. At Boston’s Music Hall, abolitionists heard Beethoven’s Fifth while waiting for the expected news.

It was nearing Christmas in the Murray Hill, New Jersey, building of Bell Labs. Smoke from tobacco and soldering irons filled Walter Brattain’s room, 1E455, as engineers bent over calibration equipment. Their goal: to figure out how to pass a current through a tiny piece of silicon and move the electrons and holes within.

After Susan Perry and Robert Watson were found guilty by a jury, they were immediately transported to prison, stripped to the waist, tied to a cart and flogged through the streets until the blood ran freely down their backs.

It is not clear how many wives Mormon founder Joseph Smith married under divine commandment -- some estimates put the number at 30.

As England’s royal claimants fought for the throne during the War of the Roses, the battles became larger and fiercer. Henry VI, of the House of Lancaster, ruled as king, but his weakness and bouts of schizophrenia emboldened his challenger, Edward IV of the House of York.

Blond, petite and pretty, Martha Dodd was the daughter of the American ambassador to Germany during the rise of the Nazis. One of Hitler’s aides thought she’d make a good girlfriend for the Fuhrer.

In April 1912, among the first- class passengers on the RMS Titanic were Isidor Straus, co-owner of Macy’s department store, and his wife, Ida, returning from a trip to Germany.

The services of West Point commander Benedict Arnold did not come cheap.

In the later years of the 19th century, Paris was a hive of spies. A network of German agents was directed by Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, the military attache; venal French citizens were caught selling sensitive information to the enemy.

One night in October 1969, President Richard Nixon, Attorney General John Mitchell and counsel John Ehrlichman went over to J. Edgar Hoover’s place for a manly dinner.