Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Agriculture
It’s our most important, profitable, and adaptable crop—the true American staple. But where did it come from?
In 1748 an inquisitive Swede named Peter Kalm, a protégé of the great botanist Linnaeus, came to America to find plants that could be useful in his country. He went around asking questions of everybody about everything. Read more >>
New Light on a Much-Loved Myth
The election of a peanut-growing President has evoked much journalistic analysis of his rural Southern roots. Read more >>
In southern California the orange found a home.
For more than thirty years it stood at the corner of Highland Avenue and Del Rosa Avenue in San Bernardino, California, bordered at the rear by a line of eucalyptus trees and behind that by a thirty-acre grove of fat green trees that joined others in a march to the foothills of the San Bernardino Read more >>
IN THE DELTA
The low-lying Delta—six and a half million acres of land rich with soil left by the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers in flood—was first opened to a cotton-hungry world in the mid-1820’s. The price of cotton was high. Read more >>
These hardy Texas beasts with “too much legs, horns, and speed” had long since been replaced by stodgier breeds. Now they were facing extinction…
If you are someone who thought the Texas longhorn was as dead as the passenger pigeon, here is a bit of news. Read more >>
Charles Marion Russell, born outside St. Louis, in Oak Hill, Missouri, of a locally prominent family in 1864, came west to Montana Territory four days short of his sixteenth birthday. Read more >>
What started as fun and games at spring roundups is now a multi-million-dollar sport called rodeo
The crowd roars. The bell clangs. The chute gate swings wide and a beleaguered animal dashes into the arena to put on an exciting exhibition of pain and panic. Read more >>
The black laborers on John Williams’ plantation never seemed to leave or complain. It took some digging to find out why
Everyone knows a little about the rise and fall of DDT—how it was once hailed as a great boon to mankind; how useful it was in field and garden, house and yard; and how at last to our dismay it was unmasked as a killer, the chemical Al Capone, a threat to our Read more >>