1984

He was a lieutenant in the Army of the United States: he saw no reason to sit in the back of the bus

Here is how political cartoonists have sized up the candidates over a tumultuous half-century.

Peter Marié, a bon vivant of the Gilded Age, asked hundreds of Society’s prettiest women to allow themselves to be painted for him alone

Twenty years ago blacks were virtually disenfranchised throughout the South. Now their votes may elect our next President.

While the Wright Brothers experimented at Kitty Hawk, a photographer named William Jennings believed he and his friends were making aviation history

A disease that no one understood laid waste a major American city. Five thousand died in two months, and Memphis was never the same again.

How our wartime experience conquered a wide range of problems from hemorrhagic shock to yellow fever

American medicine in a crucial era was at once surprisingly similar and shockingly different from what we know today. You could get aspirin at the drugstore, and anesthesia during surgery. But you could also buy opium over the counter, and the surgery would be more likely to be performed in your kitchen than in a hospital.

Americans have never been so healthy, thanks to advances in medical technology and research. Now we have to learn to deal with the staggering costs.

How a favorite local charity of Boston’s Brahmins—parochial and elite—grew into one of our great democratic medical institutions