Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Congress (U.S.)
A century after passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, many Southern blacks still were denied the vote. In 1965 Martin Luther King, Jr, set out to change that—by marching through the heart of Alabama.
From the frozen steps of Brown Chapel they could see the car moving toward them down Sylvan Street, past the clapboard homes and bleak, red-brick apartments that dotted the Negro section of Selma, Alabama.
Once again, Americans are learning the delicate art of trading with the biggest market on earth. Here’s how they did it the first time.
As American merchant ships call again at the China coast, they are following in the ghostly wake of a sailing ship of 360 tons burden which arrived at Whampoa Reach, the anchorage for Canton, on August 28, 1784—188 days out of New York.
The Facts Behind the Current Controversy Over Immigration
The ex-Presidency now carries perquisites and powers that would have amazed all but the last few who have held that office
Had Franklin D. Roosevelt not been so conservative, we might have had national health insurance forty years ago
One hundred years ago, Congress created two agencies—the U.S. Geological Survey and the Bureau of Ethnology. Both, according to the author, have since “given direction, form, and stimulation to the science of earth and the science of man, and in so doing have touched millions of lives.”
“If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, “said Abraham Lincoln, “we could better judge what to do, and haw to do it. “For nearly two hundred years, the United States Census has been trying to find out.
Americans are a counting nation.
Corruption, Yesterday and Today
The recent spate of revelations of bribery by American corporations of government officials, domestic and foreign, has left many with a sense that the business ethics of the nation are going to hell in a handbasket.
What has befallen “the greatest peacetime achievement of twentieth-century America”s since the New Deal
In recent years, as the energy crisis has developed, and bureaucracies in Washington have wrestled with little success to solve it, and Congress has moved slower than a West Virginia coal train even to agree on a battle strategy, some Americans have proposed
The leak was known of old. It can afflict either a ship or a government, it invariably means that something invisible has gone wrong, and in certain cases it ends in disaster.
And in doing so, the fate of Congress—will it be weak? will it be strong?—is determined
LBJ AND VIETNAM
He was an old-fashioned man by the purest definition. Forget that he was enamored of twentieth-century artifacts—the telephone, television, supersonic airplanes, spacecraft—to which he adapted with a child’s wondering glee.
The brilliant Polish engineer who made possible the victory at Saratoga was a fighter for freedom in both America and his homeland
A large crowd was on the wharf as the Adriana arrived in Philadelphia from England on the evening of August 18, 1797. Aboard was a distinguished passenger whose name few Americans could pronounce but whose noble reputation was well known.
The filibuster has played a key role in the enactment of federal law since 1789, but is rarely used outside the U.S. Senate.
The U.S. Post Office, 1775-1974
Clara Boule of Lewiston, Montana, recently heard from her mother. This is less than startling, since her mother, Mrs. Elmer Lazure, lives at Belt, only eighty miles from Lewiston. But—the letter was postmarked November 17, 1969
In December, 1936, Oswald Garrison Villard, longtime liberal editor of The Nation, wrote his friend Representative Maury Maverick ( 1895-1954), of San Antonio, Texas, that he wanted to inform the public of the congressional burdens caused by the New Deal’s economic emphasis.
A few dazzling words about that emerging metropolis, delivered in 1871 by Congressman J. Proctor Knott. Edited for 1971 visitors by David G. McCullough
One day in July, 1904, Lincoln Steffens, the great muckraking reporter of McClure’s Magazine , appeared quietly in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on the trail of a big story.
Was it, as Navy Secretary Welles believed, “a conspiracy to overthrow the government”?
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