America From Drake’s Quarterdeck

An old pro tells what it was like to play for the silents

How the Japanese made sense of our silent movies

Two letters from a Navy lieutenant to his wife tell the story of the last hours of World War II

Artfully composed still-life photographs from a rare 1871 album transform brushes, sponges, and stationery supplies into symbols of a proud, industrial society

In a conflict that saw saturation bombing, Auschwitz, and the atom bomb, poison gas was never used in the field. What prevented it?

He had all the right qualities. Only the time was wrong.

Starting with thirty “liberated”
rifles, Augusto Sandino forced American troops out of Nicaragua in 1933

Much has changed in Utah since World War II, but outside of the metropolitan center in the Salt Lake Valley, the addiction to rural simplicity and the idea of home is still strong.

It might seem that building a mausoleum to the great general would be a serenely melancholy task. Not at all. The bitter squabbles that surrounded the memorial set city against country and became a mirror of the forces straining turn-of-the-century America.

Four hundred years ago the first English settlers reached America. What followed was a string of disasters ending with the complete disappearance of a colony.