Antiques

Wallace Nutting Creates a Market for Antiques

John Steele Gordon | October 1999

Like so much else, they’re a product of the Industrial Revolution.

The Public Broadcasting System has a new hit on its hands for the first time in quite a while.

Richard F. Snow | April 1989

Wherever you travel in this country, you have a good chance of bringing a piece of the past home with you.

I drove 20,000 and got just one real bargain. That was up the Hudson River on a boisterous, wind-scrubbed October day 15 years ago.

A Fascination with the Common Place

Walter Karp | August/September 1986

The vast jumble of objects that once brought solace to an eccentric heiress has become a great museum of the middle class.

When Margaret Woodbury Strong died in her sleep on July 17, 1969, the demise of the 72-year-old widow did not go unnoticed in Rochester, New York. For one thing, Mrs. Strong was one of Rochester’s richest inhabitants.

Dime-store Doughboys

Henry I. Kurtz | December 1986

50 years ago, these rough-and-ready tin soldiers were sold from bins cheap and by the handful. Today, collectors are seeking them for their bright, simple vitality.

Commercially made metal toy soldiers date back to the late 18th century, when German tinsmiths began casting two-dimensional or “flat” figures of the sort immortalized by Hans Christian Andersen in “The Steadfast Tin Soldier.” European firms went on to develo

Henry Francis Du Pont And The Invention Of Winterthur

Walter Karp | April/May 1983

How a shy millionaire’s peculiar genius transformed his “country place” into an unparalleled showcase of American furnishings
A HERITAGE PRESERVED

SOME SIX MILES north of Wilmington lies a stretch of countryside chiefly inhabited by du Ponts, du Pont servants, and some two dozen major du Pont estates.

Electra Webb And Her American Past

Walter Karp | April/May 1982

How a brave and gifted woman defied her parents and her background to create the splendid collection that is Shelburne

What do the following items have in common—a peerless collection of old American juilts, a 220-foot steam-driven side-wheeler, last of its noble race, and the exact replica of six beautiful rooms in a millionaire’s Park Avenue apartment?

England’s All-american Corner

Roy Bongartz | August 1974

At Bath the British can catch glimpses of their rebellious daughter country’s history in an unusual museum

The scene is one of a quintessential Englishness: a stately manor house with sparkling bay windows giving out upon a broad expanse of finely trimmed lawn that reaches out toward the river Avon in the valley below, an exquisite formal garden with pebbled walks

Pricing The Past

February/March 1980

A splendid gathering of American folk art—half a century before its time

In recent years Pine Street has become the center of Philadelphia’s antiques market, and the shopkeepers there would give a great deal to be able to visit a store that must have been the object of considerable ridicule to their turn-ofthe-century forerunners.

Greenfield Village

Walter Karp | December 1980

What happened when the richest man in America decided to collect one of everything

The whole curious enterprise puzzled Americans in the 1920’s.

Art Out Of The Attic

December 1971

Along with their rusty bedsprings, broken chairs, and other relics, the attics, closets, basements, and barns in this country are stuffed with pictorial surprises.

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Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.