Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Woodrow Wilson
A century after the guns fell silent along the Western Front, the work they did there remains of incalculable importance to the age we inhabit and the people we are
We re-publish an essay President Hoover wrote for American Heritage in 1958 recounting his experiences as an aide to Woodrow Wilson at the peace talks after World War I. This important first-person narrative candidly details the difficulties that Wilson faced in what Hoover called “the greatest drama of intellectual leadership in all history.”
Reprinted from the June 1958 issue of American Heritage. Read more >>
Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson recalled his time as a "driver" in the horse-drawn artillery, after Pres. Wilson discovered the U.S. had practically no Army.
From "Practice Range," American Heritage, February, 1968 Read more >>
In 1917, fed up with the inaction of conservative suffragists, Alice Paul decided on the unorthodox strategy of pressuring the president directly
Women suffragists picketing in front of the White House Read more >>
Why Have Our Presidents Almost Always Stumbled After Their First Four Years?
Why the UN was in trouble from the start
The Model T Ford made the world we live in. On the 100th anniversary of the company Henry Ford founded, his biographer Douglas Brinkley tells how.
"I will build a motor car for the great multitude,” Henry Ford proclaimed to the public when he announced the machine that would change America and indeed the world. Read more >>
Smarter than stupid, of course; but does the intellectual tradition that began with the century suggest there is such a thing as being too smart for the country’s good?
The head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee explains why it has always frustrated Presidents—and why it doesn’t have to
I have occasionally been referred to as “Senator No,” and I’m proud of the title. But when it comes to saying no, I’m not even in the same ballpark with the first North Carolinian to serve as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Nathaniel Ma¡on. Read more >>
An Interview with the President and the First Lady
On a busy Wednesday morning last August, President and Mrs. Clinton found an hour to speak with me in the Oval Office of the White House. Read more >>
Of all the Allied leaders, argues FDR's biographer, only Roosevelt saw clearly the shape of the new world they were fighting to create
AFTER HALF A CENTURY IT IS HARD TO APPROACH FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT EXCEPT through a minefield of clichés. Theories of FDR, running the gamut from artlessness to mystification, have long paraded before our eyes. Read more >>
Seventy-five years after the guns fell silent along the Western Front, the work they did there remains of incalculable importance to the age we inhabit and the people we are
In many ways 1918 is closer to us than we are inclined to think. Read more >>
The Cold War was an anomaly: more often than not the world’s two greatest states have lived together in uneasy amity. And what now?
Exactly two hundred years after George Washington’s inauguration as the first President of the United States and three hundred years after Peter the Great’s ascent to the Russian throne, a new chapter opened in the history of the relations of the two greatest Read more >>
President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the first Mother’s Day on May 10. Read more >>
You Asked for It
When American Heritage suggested last year that I put together the article that became “101 Things Every College Graduate Should Know about American History,” I accepted the assignment eagerly. Read more >>
An old, familiar show is back in Washington. There’s a new cast, of course, but the script is pretty much the same as ever. Here’s the program.
WHEN THE IRAN-CONTRA STORY BROKE LAST NOVEMBER, A NUMBER OF public figures as well as news commentators put the revelations in a historical context. Read more >>
Beatrix Farrand’s exactingly beautiful designs changed the American landscape
When Beatrix Farrand arrived to work on a garden, clients knew they were in the presence of someone extraordinary. Read more >>
A noted historian’s very personal tour of the city where so much of the American past took shape—with excursions into institutions famous and obscure, the archives that are the nation’s memory, and the haunts of some noble ghosts
The only one of our Presidents who retired to Washington after leaving office was Woodrow Wilson, and for all his celebrated professorial background he certainly did it in style. Read more >>
This is not a test. It’s the real thing.
How precise is the educated American’s understanding of the history of our country? I don’t mean exact knowledge of minor dates, or small details about the terms of laws, or questions like “Who was secretary of war in 1851?” ( Answer: Charles M. Read more >>
Banking as we’ve known it for centuries is dead, and we don’t really know the consequences of what is taking its place. A historical overview.
For the last several years congressional committees and presidential task forces have been nattering back and forth about what should be done to change the legal order that establishes and specifically empowers and regulates the nation’s banks. Read more >>
An Interview With Archibald MacLeish
SENT ON A HOPELESSLY VAGUE ASSIGNMENT BY WOODROW WILSON, AMERICAN SOLDIERS FOUND THEMSELVES IN THE MIDDLE OF A FEROCIOUS SQUABBLE AMONG BOLSHEVIKS, COSSACKS, CZECHS, JAPANESE, AND OTHERS
During mid-August, 1918, American forces began landing at Vladivostok, the capital of the Soviet Maritime Territory, in one of the more curious side shows of the First World War. Read more >>
Wilson's letters to Mary were frequent and intimate, but it would have been political suicide to marry a divorcee by the post-Victorian standards of the time
On the afternoon of September 18, 1915, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States and a widower, wrote a brief note that he knew might change the rest of his life. The note, sent by messenger, was for Edith Boiling Galt, to whom he was secretly engaged. Read more >>
Of the skyscrapers that sprang up in American cities in the early years of this century and embodied in masonry and steel the swaggering vitality of American technology and American business enterprise, none took so firm a grip on the public imagination as th Read more >>
Unlike many other flags, which evolved long after the character of their nations was established, the American flag was born with the Revolution, and few if any national emblems have inspired the veneration we accord it. Read more >>
It became apparent that this influenza was a first-rate killer.
In the last week of October, 1918, 2,700 Americans died “over there” in battle against the kaiser’s army. The same week 21,000 Americans died of influenza in the United States. Read more >>
An interview with the famed suffragette, Alice Paul
Perched on Mount Falcon as the mist rose and the cloudcapped towers caught the first rays of the morning sun, it would seem a dream palace, the residence of the Great Khan or a Dalai Lama, remote, unapproachable, yet somehow the center of the world. Read more >>
… and grew, and grew, and grew …
Sixty years ago the permanent individual income tax, with escalation built into its table of rates, came on gently and quietly, by no means ignored, yet not the object of any great furor, either. Read more >>