Edward Kohn

Edward Kohn appears in the following:

Hot Time in the Old Town

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Edward Kohn discusses one of the worst natural disasters in American history—the 1896 New York heat wave, which killed almost 1,500 people in ten days. In Hot Time in the Old Town: The Great Heat Wave of 1896 and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt, he tells how the heat coincided with a heated presidential contest between William McKinley and Democrat William Jennings Bryan. Their hopes for the presidency began to fizzle in the heat just as a bright young police commissioner named Theodore Roosevelt was helping the city cope with the dangerously high temperatures by hosing down streets and handing out ice to the poor.

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How a Heat Wave Helped Make a President

Friday, July 30, 2010

When you think of the biggest natural disasters in U.S. history, what are the first things that come to mind? Certainly Hurricane Katrina, maybe one of the several San Francisco earthquakes, the great Chicago fire. However, most people have never heard of one of the most lethal: the heat wave of 1896.

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Excerpt from Edward Kohn's "Hot Time in the Old Town"

Thursday, July 29, 2010

PRI
WNYC

Prologue: "The Heated Term"

On August 15, 1896, while preparing to depart for a three-week vacation out west, Theodore Roosevelt wrote to his sister Anna, whom he called his Darling Bye.  “We've had two excitements in New York the past week; the heated term, and Bryan's big meeting,” he wrote.  “The heated term was the worst and most fatal we have ever known.  The death-rate trebled until it approached the ratio of a cholera epidemic; the horses died by the hundreds, so that it was impossible to remove their carcasses, and they added a genuine flavor of pestilence, and we had to distribute hundred of tons of ice from the station-houses to the people of the poorer precincts.”  Roosevelt, then 37 and president of New York's Board of Police Commissioners, was describing one of the most historic weeks in the city's history. 

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