Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Gold
The author leads a search for hidden treasure in the amazingly complete documentary history of a California ghost town
The road to Bodie, California, turns to gravel as it meanders upward from U.S. 395 on a thirteen-mile climb through sagebrush to an elevation of almost eighty-five hundred feet. Read more >>
California has always been as much a state of mind as a geographical entity. For the better part of two centuries, artists have been defining its splendid promise.
BEFORE THE DISCOVERY of gold at Sutler’s mill in 1848, the population of California was too small and too scattered to produce much painting. Read more >>
Solid-gold coins were legal tender for most of the nation's history. In their brilliant surfaces we can see our past fortunes.
NOWADAYS MONEY SEEMS to have become a pure idea, a universally agreed-upon fiction conveyed by pieces of paper, plastic cards, computers, and coins made of nearly worthless metal. Read more >>
The saga of Kip Wagner, the first modern American to grow rich from ancient Spanish treasure
The stretch of sand that runs along for miles at the margin of Cape Canaveral was irresistibly reminiscent, I thought, of Cape Cod. But then one sandspit is very like another, except for the temperature surrounding it. Read more >>
The Klondike Photographs of Clarke and Clarence Kinsey
In the words of historian William Bronson, it was “the last grand adventure,” and there is no denying the dimensions of the event: in 1897 and 1898, at least one hundred thousand people took passage to the scruffy little towns of Dyea and Skagway in the Alask Read more >>
Underschooled and ill-equipped, the men who attended the pioneers practiced a rugged brand of medicine—but they made some major advances all the same
At every step in the trek westward, America’s pioneers found an enemy more ubiquitous, more stealthy, and more deadly than the Indians, yet in our histories we tend to forget this dread opponent. It was, quite simply, disease. Read more >>
Granddaddy of all desert mining discoveries was the Comstock Lode, which sent the Far West on a silver stampede to Nevada’s Washoe country a century ago.