Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
James A. Garfield
After assassinating President Garfield, a lunatic gunman mounted an insanity defense, which the jury--and the nation--rejected, despite compelling evidence to the contrary.
One warm summer night in 1881, a scrawny, nervous man sat in his boarding house a few blocks from the White House. Outside his window, gaslights flickered and horses clopped over cobblestones, but Charles Guiteau barely noticed.
The story of how a blast of cool, dry air changed America
IN THE SUMMER of 1881, as James Garfield lay dying of an assassin’s bullet in the White House, a team of naval engineers was called in to solve a vexing problem: how to cool the President’s bedroom.
A century ago a President’s murderer went on trial for the first time in our history. The issues raised then continue to trouble us.
The twentieth President of the United States was shot in a Washington, D.C., railroad station on July 2, 1881. He died seventy-nine days later from infections resulting from his wound.
John Mason Hutchings, an Englishman, first, saw Yosemite Valley in 1855 and never got it out of his system. Nine years later he returned to the valley to be innkeeper of the Hutchings House, the frame hotel at left.
One summer brought excitement and glory to the young secretary of a political leader. How could he know that the next one would brim with tragedy?
Two shots rang out in the railroad station, and the President of the United States slumped to the floor, mortally wounded
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