Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Gettysburg
In only minutes, Union guns at Gettysburg silenced the Confederacy's bold invasion of the North
Not until 2:30 p.m. on July 3, 1863, did the ear-splitting bombardment finally slacken on the rolling farmland of southern Pennsylvania. Nothing like it had ever been experienced before in America, or would be again. Read more >>
Our most talented writer-president always wrote his own material and sweated hours over it
Reading America’s Most Famous Speech
No presidential speech has been as widely analyzed, memorized, or canonized as Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Read more >>
George Nelson Clocks
George Nelson said he got into furniture design by accident, and indeed the architect didn’t actually create many of the mid-twentieth-century modernist icons synonymous with his name. The bubble lamp, the coconut chair, the sling sofa, and others he’s commonly credited with were styled by associates in his New York City office. Read more >>
How Mount Vernon Rebuilt The First President
The 3 Faces of George Washington The Buyable Past Resources The Gettysburg Gospen Read more >>
A LEADING CIVIL WAR HISTORIAN CHANGES ONE SMALL HAPPENSTANCE—WHICH IN TURN CHANGES EVERYTHING
Alone among all American battlefields, the scene of the Civil War’s costliest encounter is patrolled by government-licensed historians who keep alive for visitors the memory of what happened there
Like his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather before him, Dave was a Michigan farmer. His great-grandfather had emigrated from Poland in 1X61, briefly worked in the Detroit area, then enlisted in the 24th Michigan. Read more >>
The storm broke over their small town and changed their lives forever
James Alexander Wal Read more >>
Gettysburg, Fifty Years After
The most dramatic and tragic moment of the American Civil War was the climactic point of Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg on the afternoon of July 3,1863. Read more >>
Our American heritage is greater than any one of us.
An 1857 12-pound Napolean cannon still guards the battlefield at Gettysburg. Photo by Craig M. Fildes.
The sun goes down every evening over the muzzle of a gun that has been a museum piece for nearly a century, and where there was a battlefield there is now a park, with green fields rolling west under the sunset haze to the misty blue mountain wall. You can see it all just about as it used to be, and to look at it brings up deep moods and sacred memories that are part of our American heritage. Read more >>