The most infamous scandal to shake the nation's capital: a New York Congressman's murder of his wife's lover, Washington's district attorney, the son of the man who wrote "The Star Spangled Banner." Representative Dan Sickles shot Philip Barton Key in front of seven witnesses, his plea of not guilty based on a totally new legal defense, temporary insanity.

No community better reflected the growing passion against slavery than Oberlin College. In September 1858 the sudden kidnapping of a runaway slave who was living in Oberlin caused the entire community and its college students to rush to his rescue. The slave was rescued, but 37 of his rescuers were identified and put on trial for violating federal law, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The case became a cause c l bre throughout the North.

In a desperate attempt to bring the North to the bargaining table and end what was to the South a losing war, Confederate spies in Canada launch a plot to burn New York City on the day after Thanksgiving in 1864. A group of rebel officers...all escapees from Union prison camps who had fled to neutral Canada for safety...reach the city by train and, in disguise, take rooms in various hotels in downtown New York. They fail but only because, unknowingly, they use a chemical mixture that requires oxygen.

Smoke from the incipient fires they set is quickly discovered and the fires put out. In the dramatic search for the conspirators that follows, only one of them is caught, Robert Cobb Kennedy, a captain from Louisiana. He is tried, convicted and hanged...the last rebel executed by the North before the end of the war.

On the afternoon of December 30, 1903, during a sold-out matinee performance, a fire broke out in Chicago's Iroquois Theatre. In the short span of twenty minutes, more than six hundred people were asphyxiated, burned, or trampled to death in a panicked mob's failed attempt to escape. In "Chicago Death Trap: The Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903, " Nat Brandt provides a detailed chronicle of this horrific event to assess not only the titanic tragedy of the fire itself but also the municipal corruption and greed that kindled the flames beforehand and the political cover-ups hidden in the smoke and ash afterwards.

Advertised as "absolutely fireproof, " the Iroquois was Chicago's most modern playhouse when it opened in the fall of 1903. With the approval of the city's building department, theater developers Harry J. Powers and William J. Davis opened the theater prematurely to take full advantage of the holiday crowds, ignoring flagrant safety violations in the process.

The aftermath of the fire proved to be a study in the miscarriage of justice. Despite overwhelming evidence that the building had not been completed, that fire safety laws were ignored, and that management had deliberately sealed off exits during the performance, no one was ever convicted or otherwise held accountable for the enormous loss of life.

Lavishly illustrated and featuring an introduction by Chicago historians Perry R. Duis and Cathlyn Schallhorn, "Chicago"" Death Trap: The IroquoisTheatre Fire of 1903 "is rich with vivid details about this horrific disaster, captivatingly presented in human terms without losing sight of the broader historical context.