Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Education
A stern but brilliant Yankee revolutionized American higher education while president of our oldest university
Charles William Eliot cast a long shadow for a good many of his descendants, naturally enough. As a great-grandchild of his I felt it, too. The summers of my earliest boyhood, at Northeast Harbor, Maine, were spent partly in his austere presence.
In founding Groton, Endicott Peabody was sure that muscular Christianity would protect
boys from the perils of loaferism
One of the most illustrious of these benevolent despots was the Reverend Endicott Peabody, who founded Groton School in 1884 and served it with all his might and main for over half a century.
Americans first learned to read to save their souls, then to govern themselves. Now the need is not so clear.
In 1765 John Adams wrote that “A native of America who cannot read or write is as rare an appearance as a Jacobite or a Roman Catholic, that is, as rare as a comet or an earthquake.” He went on to say that “all candid foreigners who have p
Nobody was murdered or maimed, but nobody backed down for twenty years in the struggle over school integration in Prince Edward County, Virginia. Who finally won?
Today’s city, for all its ills, is “cleaner, less crowded, safer, and more livable than its turn-of-the-century counterpart,” argues this eminent urban historian. Yet two new problems are potentially fatal. …
More than a decade ago the phrase “urban crisis” crept into our public conversation. Since then it has become a cliché, connoting a wide range of persistent and dangerous problems confronting our cities.
Why the most fascinating of subjects is made to seem the most boring—and what can be done about it
Those who had the pleasure, a few years ago, of reading Frances FitzGerald’s award-winning work Fire in the Lake should know that her strength is in what might be called cultural anatomy—the careful dissection of the webs of ha
THE LIVING DREAM
Why study American history, anyway?
HOW A FARSIGHTED QUAKER MERCHANT AND FOUR GREAT DOCTORS BROUGHT FORTH, WITH MADDENING SLOWNESS, ONE OF THE FINEST MEDICAL CENTERS IN THE WORLD
In 1884, after he was offered an appointment to the medical faculty of the newly created Johns Hopkins University, Dr.
NO, SAY THREE AMERICAN HISTORIANS. BUT THE PATIENT IS AILING AND THEY THINK THEY KNOW WHY AND WHAT TO PRESCRIBE.
The “Monkey Trial” brought two ideologies into a great conflict, and it was very, very hot
“Your body is a temple,” our ancestors told their pubescent youngsters. ‘Now go take a cold bath”
Standards of propriety were lofty indeed
Veblen’s ideas on the effect of wealth on behavior were penetrating, original and, to the dismay of his contemporaries, highly uninhibited.
DRAWN FOR AMERICAN HERITAGE BY LITNESS
The new teacher, Miss Flock, was hired just one week before country school opened.
In the year 1854 a young man named George Washington Eastman rather reluctantly maintained a residence in Waterville, New York.
In 1865, after a highly successful career as an art teacher and wood engraver in New York City, Henry W. Herrick returned to his family’s home in Manchester, New Hampshire, to care for his aging mother.
THE ALL-RECORDING LENS RECALLS A TIME WHEN PEDAGOGY STILL WAS PLEASANT
Sometimes the camera solidifies a modest moment in history in a way that reminds us sharply of securities we have left behind.
We have come a long way from the philosophy of the Enlightenment...a shift that represents a retreat rather than an advance, argues the noted historian.
We think of our own time as an Age of Enlightenment, but it flouts and even repudiates two essential principles of the Enlightenment: first the priority of the claims of science and culture over those of politics, and second the cosmopolitan and even universal nature of science
A bitter feud among the bones
In the early 1870’s two American scientists began a vicious personal contest for position and eminence in the world of science.
Back in 1883, when girls were still considered young ladies, the Chestnut Street Female Seminary moved to a new home—a palatial mansion outside Philadelphia that was surrounded by 180 acres of tree-studded hills.
Supporters of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School believed that complete absorption of the Indian into American society was best for everyone
Brevet Major General G. A. Custer and about 215 soldiers of the 7th Cavalry had been massacred at the Little Big Horn only a little more than three years before. Geronimo and his Apaches would not surrender for another seven years.
That splendid flower of New England— the town meeting—wilts under the scrutiny of a native son
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