Americans have been launching time capsules into the future for over a century now, and today we’re creating more than ever. Why is it that so few reach their destination? And that so many merely bore their recipients?
Connections with childhood, with a way of looking at life, and with a generation that remade our world
A LIFETIME AGO A QUIET STRANGER passed through the author’s hometown and came away with a record of both personal and national importance
ON THE ROAD DURING THE ERA OF GREATEST PERIL FOR THE ONE INDISPENSABLE AMERICAN SHOW
As a ten-year-old boy, the author had a role to play in bringing Douglas MacArthur’s vision of democracy to a shattered Japan
This magazine’s publication of wrenching wartime letters between the author’s parents brought her to international attention. At the same time, it initiated some very heartfelt conversations with our readers.
He spent his tour of duty bombing German cities and made it home only to discover he could never leave the war behind him. Then, a lifetime later, he found a way to make peace.
QUESTIONING THE MYSTERIES OF HER OWN FAMILY, THE AUTHOR FINDS ANSWERS THAT AFFECT US ALL
Forty years changed almost everything—but not the author’s gleaming, troubling memories of Miss Clark. So he went looking for her.
A D-DAY VETERAN’S GRANDSON ATTEMPTS TO FIND THE ANSWER TO THAT MOST IMPENETRABLE QUESTION: WHAT WAS IT LIKE?
A novelist joins his ancestor on a trip West and discovers in her daily travails an intimate view of a tremendous national migration
A MEMOIR OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Seeking the answer to a simple and terrible question: What was it like?
An Airman’s Sketchbook
In the twilight of Castro’s regime, one of the soldiers who put him in power recalls what it was like to be a fidelista up in the hills four decades ago when a whole new, just, democratic world was there for the building
Seeking the truth of an event in the memories of the people who lived it can be a maddening task—and an exhilarating one
The mysterious thing that happened to Lieutenant Colonel Brown over Bremen in 1943 sent the pilot off on a quest that lasted his entire life. Finally he found the answer. It had been worth waiting for.
You can rise fast and far in America, but sometimes the cost of the journey is hard to tally
When the author moved into a 1905 house on an island near Seattle, he found himself sharing it with the uncommon people who had lived there before him
Discovering a giant in the family
An American soldier would never forget encountering the German with an icy smile. He would later discover that the blood of innocent millions dripped from Eichman's manicured hands
George Templeton Strong was not a public man, and he is not widely known today. But for forty years he kept the best diary—in both historic and literary terms—ever written by an American.
You probably haven’t seen it, but it’s out by the tracks of the Chicago & North Western
An astonishing saga of endurance and high courage told by a man who lived through it
A distinguished American poet recalls one of his more unusual jobs
Despite his feeling that “we are beginning to lose the memory of what a restrained and civil society can be like,” the senior senator from New York—a lifelong student of history—remains an optimist about our system of government and our extraordinary resilience as a people
After a year at the University of Missouri boning up on American history, a Chinese professor tells what she discovered about us and how she imparts her new knowledge to the folks back home in the People’s Republic.
All this Florida boy wanted to do was rejoin his regiment. Instead they drafted him into the Confederate secret service.
The great man’s daughter-in-law draws a portrait of the statesman at the top of his career and at the bottom