Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Cigarettes
Why, with cigarette smoking under attack everywhere, does everyone still light up on the movie screen?
There was a “Nightline” a while back during which Jeff Greenfield delivered a puzzled examination of smoking in the movies. Read more >>
You’ve probably never heard of them, but these ten people changed your life. Each of them is a big reason why your world today is so different from anyone’s world in 1954
For want of nails, kingdoms are won and lost. We all know that. The shoe slips, the horse stumbles, the army dissolves in retreat. But who designed the nails? Who hammered the nails? Who invented the nail-making machinery? Read more >>
The mysterious apotheosis of the newspaper editor
It’s a bad sign when a company decides that to sell its products it needs to bundle them together with miscellaneous, unrelated goods. It suggests that relations have grown strained between product and customer, that either the product is obsolete or the competition is fierce. Read more >>
In the past seventy years, while several major diseases have been eradicated, one has risen from obscurity to take its place among the nation’s leading killers.
The patient at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, in 1919, might have wondered during his last days why all the physicians were so peculiarly interested in his case. When the man died, Dr. Read more >>
Once you’ve discovered fire, you have to keep it from burning you. This is how it was managed before the safety match.
THE HUNDRED-YEAR WAR AGAINST THE CIGARETTE
It was like any other Tuesday lunch hour, until the sheriff’s deputies walked in. Mr. Ernest Bamberger, general manager of the Keystone Mining Company and recent (unsuccessful) Republican candidate for United States senator, and Mr. John C. Read more >>