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Our first Korean war, in 1871, was fought to open the Hermit Kingdom to Western trade. But the hermits wanted very much to be left alone Read >>
Some Americans may have trouble listing the fifty united states. Some may be vague about who represents them in Congress. But it’s a sure bet that every one of us—over the age of three— can identify the nation’s most prominent rodent Read >>
The wheels of westering settlers moved through an ocean of grass. It was a rich natural heritage, but within a century we almost destroyed it Read >>
For nearly fifty years, in one way or another, Ben Butler courted the favor of his state and the nation. He way not have been a bona fide Beauty, but there were times when his traditional nickname did not seem quite fair either Read >>
Tourists who ride the famous cog railway up the precipitous slopes of Mount Washington often feel the sky itself is their destination. Overcoming many obstacles—including a recent serious accident—the little locomotives with their tilted boilers have been huffing and puffing people to New England’s highest summit for nearly a century Read >>
Fanny Kemble should have known that a beautiful, brilliant, vivacious British actress never, never marries the Butler—especially an American slaveholding Butler with a narrow vision of a wife’s role Read >>
President Roosevelt had failed to “pack” a hostile Supreme Court, and now the first New Dealer he named to that high bench stood accused of being a lifetime member of the infamous Ku Klux Klan Read >>
In the mining country of the Old West some men struck it rich without touching a shovel. All it took was a little legerdemain—and a sucker bitten by the gold bug Read >>
The President’s popularity was waning, and he was facing an able Republican as well as two rebels from his own party. At hand was the with the nation in peril at home and abroad. Then Harry S.Truman set out to give ’em hell. Read >>
The fearless sailors who manned America’s whaling fleet in the nineteenth century were no strangers to danger, but even the bravest trembled at the unknown prospects of becoming castaways on forbidden shores Read >>
Surviving encounters with an awesome variety of enraged wildlife—rhinos, lions, tsetse flies, studio brass—Trader Horn, Hollywood’s first jungle spectacular, became the progenitor of hundreds of white-hunter-meets-white-goddess epics Read >>
The plundering miners have been replaced by the plundering tourists. Can the Rockies survive this new invasion? Read >>

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