August 1963
Features
To the backwoods distillers of Pennsylvania, that was like taxing the air they breathed. Rut the government was deadly serious: the Constitution itself was at stake
“Mr. House is my second personality,” said Woodrow Wilson early in his Presidency. Then, as the Paris Peace Conference proceeded, the friendship dissolved —for reasons that have never been fully understood. As he lay dying in 1938, Colonel House gave his explanation to President Charles Seymour of Yale, editor of his Intimate Papers , with the understanding that it remain secret for 25 years after his death. Here, for the first time, it is revealed.
Commercial enterprise and history seldom make comfortable bedfellows
Sam Clemens, jack of many trades, hit the big town in 1864. Two years later, his true vocation discovered, he strode upon the national scene as Mark Twain
In the 1860’s, Japanese artists pictured the first Americans in a newly opened land. Their work was a mixture of keen observation and delightful misinformation
It was a lot of work, but somehow running a retail food store in the pre-cellophane era was rewarding
His main-deck guns were silenced, his hold was filling fast, and one of his own ships was firing into him. Still John Paul Jones refused to strike
Into seven crucial years of American colonial history, a young Scots-American officer packed more of the stuff that makes heroes than perhaps a dozen more illustrious men. Yet today his name has slipped into almost complete obscurity
A distinguished newsman recalls a snowy night in wartime Paris, when a radio network briefly rescued from obscurity “one of the most extraordinary Frenchmen who ever lived”
New evidence suggests that Manjiro, the first Japanese to see the U. S., not only played an unrecognized part in the opening of Japan, but also helped save the pride of its young navy from a watery grave
The whole center of the metropolis was ablaze: a hundred thousand people fled from their homes in panic
So spoke the Union general a few minutes after he was shot in the crowded lobby of a hotel in Louisville. His killer, a fellow general and subordinate, never regretted the deed—and never paid for it
DARTMOUTH COLLEGE V. WOODWARD
Departments
READING, WRITING, AND HISTORY
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Why do we need a national nonprofit membership society for American history?
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“Save America’s Treasures” has been totally eliminated—the largest Federal program supporting preservation of such treasures as the original Star Spangled Banner and George Washington’s tent.
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65% of Americans don’t know what happened at the Constitutional Convention, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
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The “Teaching American History” grants—the largest Federal program supporting history education—have been completely eliminated.
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Visits to the Top 20 Civil War battlefields have dropped in half from 1970 to 2009 according to official National Park Service statistics.
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40% of Americans can’t identify whom we fought in World War II, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
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A quarter of Americans believe Congress shares power over U.S. foreign policy with the United Nations, according to a recent Annenberg survey.
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“There is little that is more important for an American citizen to know than the history and traditions of his country,” John F. Kennedy wrote in American Heritage.
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The “We the People Program,” which touched some 30 million students and 90,000 teachers over 25 years, has been completely eliminated.
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Two-thirds of Americans could not correctly name Yorktown as the last major military action of the American Revolution, according to a recent national Gallup survey.
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The National Heritage Areas and Scenic Byways program, the only major Federal program encouraging visits to historic places, has been completely eliminated in Congressional committee.
