Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Charles Dickens
The man who has lived with him nearly as long as Samuel Clemens did tells why Twain still has the power to delight—and to disturb
Beginning with a lecture in St. Louis in 1867, Mark Twain’s famous career as a public speaker spanned about 40 years. But thanks to his avatar Hal Holbrook, he has gone on amusing and instructing and scolding us for another half-century on stages all over the world. Read more >>
A hundred and fifty years ago, a sea of grass spread from the Ohio to the Rockies; now only bits and pieces of that awesome wilderness remain for the traveler to discover.
Behind my grandparents’ house, the house in which I was born, rose a high pasture, little used in my boyhood and then only for grazing a few head of cattle. Read more >>
How the Philadelphia waterworks became a potent symbol of our lost belief that nature and technology could live together in harmony
Charles Dickens apparently found little to beguile him when he visited Philadelphia in the 1840’s. Read more >>
The Literary Lights Were Always Bright at
Everyone wanted to be invited to 148 Charles Street, where Charles Dickens mixed the punch and taught the guests parlor games, John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe vied in telling ghost stories, and Nathaniel Hawthorne paced the bedroom floor one unhappy night in t Read more >>