Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Arizona
By war-making and shrewd negotiating, the 11th president expanded U.S. territory by a third.
IN FEBRUARY 28, 1848, President James K. Polk received a visit from Ambrose Sevier of Arkansas, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, bearing bad news. Read more >>
A city where the desert is everywhere, where sprawl into magnificent desolation is the main industry, whose oldest building is still its most beautiful, whose surrounding mountains are its soul: Lawrence W. Cheek explains why American Heritage’s Great American Place Award for the year 2000 goes to…
From law officer to murderer to Hollywood consultant: the strange career of a man who became myth
Late in his life Henry Fonda, at dinner with a producer named Melvin Shestack, recalled meeting an old man who said he had firsthand knowledge of a memorable Fonda character, Wyatt Earp, the legendary frontier lawman of John Ford’s classic My Darling Cl Read more >>
Fort Adobe
The building shown below may look like a low-rise adobe condominium, and in a sense, that is what it is today—someone’s house. Read more >>
Organizers held an old-fashioned cattle drive to commemorate the cowboy's role in winning the West, but, as they say, nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
The cowboys are gone, and so are the critters, Owen Ulph tells us in “The Cowboy and the Critter” on the preceding pages. The West, Ulph says, will never see their like again. Read more >>
Western miners, the hard-rock stiffs, were as tough and horny-handed a breed of men as any in the world.
The man and the face are anonymous-and familiar. Read more >>
Isolation ends for “the People of Peace”
Perched on the edge of a rocky mesa six hundred feet above the desert of northeastern Arizona is the Hopi Indian village of Hotevilla. Read more >>