Trusted Writing on History, Travel, Food and Culture Since 1949
1960s
The annual Burning Man Festival in Black Rock City, Nevada, is a week-long binge of festive dress, radical inclusion and pyrotechnic display that has become a spiritual phenomenon.
As the sun set over the Pacific on the longest day of the year, a dozen revelers on a San Francisco beach propped up a wooden man. The first Man. Read more >>
Forty years ago a few rich kids hatched a nutty idea that became an event that rocked the nation, then morphed into a movement whose legacy lives on. Read more >>
A magazine reporter covered the first American deaths in Vietnam, unaware that the soon-to-explode war would mark America’s awakening to maturity
On the evening of July 8, 1959, six of the eight American advisers stationed at a camp serving as the headquarters of a South Vietnamese army division 20 miles northeast of Saigon had settled down after supper in their mess to watch a movie, The Tattered Dress, starring Read more >>
What we spent to get through 1964
The Home Read more >>
January 11 Surgeon General Luther L. Terry
releases his report on cigarette smoking.
January 16 Hello, Dolly! opens at the St. James Theater in New York City. Read more >>
Viewing a transformation that still affects all of us—through the prism of a single year
It has been called the “burned-over decade,” a “dream and a nightmare,” the “definitive end of the Dark Ages, and the beginning of a more hopeful and democratic period” in American history. Read more >>
Reflections on the Rat Pack
Everybody knows what they did. This is what they meant.
On January 19, 1961, at a gala in Washington’s National Armory on the eve of his Inauguration, President-elect John Kennedy made a remarkable gesture. He rose to tell the crowd, “We’re all indebted to a great fnettes—Frank Sinatra.” Read more >>