Forgetting events is part of the way we create memories. It also explains the Facebook crisis, Putin and Trump
On the wall of a nouveau gastropub, inside a value-priced chain hotel, just steps from the Magnificent Mile, hangs a simple marker.
It's not much to look at: It's the same kind of wooden plaque you might find in a drawer in your dad's office, a corporate memento of that time he won salesman of the year. Not that you remember him winning, because you don't. But the plaque in the pub marks something of intriguing historic significance: the childhood home of the first American to die in World War I. The site of which is now a Courtyard by Marriott.
Edward Mandell Stone, a son of our city, died in the winter of 1915 because his fervor to stop German aggression compelled him to join up with the French Foreign Legion while the vast majority of his countrymen were safe at home, sleeping in their own beds, not thinking about involving themselves in a war that seemed very far away from
