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March 2023
1min read


Getting, spending, and lending…

Now, when all the rules have changed, Martin Mayer, the author of Madison Avenue, USA and Wall Street , reviews the two hundred years of American banking that led to the cash machine.

Scott and Ernest…

The literary historian Alfred Kazin shows how Hemingway and Fitzgerald helped define what it meant to be American in the first half of this century.

How to post your wife …

To “post” one’s wife meant to publish a formal notice in a newspaper of her shortcomings. Discontented husbands in the eighteenth century did this with great abandon; but the wives caught on soon enough and began to post right back.

Truman and MacArthur…

The clash of these mighty opposites raised one of the most profound issues that can confront a republic: Who is to wage war, the generals or the elected civilian government? Walter Karp explains how the Constitution won.

Plus…

David Davidson proves that our South American policy is no more confused now than it was forty years ago when we tried to do good in Ecuador. … Peggy Robbins tells the weird story of the Wesley brothers’ feckless efforts to bring religion to eighteenth-century Georgia. They did better later as the founders of Methodism. … The caricaturist Edward Sorel recalls such lost pleasures as house calls, servants for the middle classes, and guilt-free chain smoking. … From the Avery Library of Architecture and Fine Arts at Columbia University we offer some beautiful architectural renderings never published before. All this and still more.

We hope you enjoy our work.

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Stories published from "February/March 1984"

Authored by: John Kobler

The great tenor came to America in 1903, and it was love at first sight—a love that survived an earthquake and some trouble with the police about a woman at the zoo

Authored by: Richard D. Brown

The early years of our republic produced dozens of great leaders. A historian explains how men like Adams and Jefferson were selected for public office, and tells why the machinery that raised them became obsolete.

Authored by: John R. Stilgoe

Today more Americans live in them than in city and country combined. How did we get there?

Authored by: William B. Meyer

…And what’s more, the planet’s highly civilized inhabitants live together in perfect harmony. So argued an eminent astronomer named Percival Lowell, and for decades tens of thousands of Americans believed him.

Authored by: The Editors

The richly embellished account book of an eighteenth-century sea captain, newly discovered in a Maine attic

Authored by: Harry G. Summers Jr

The first major engagement of the U. S. Army in Vietnam was a decisive American victory. Perhaps it would have been better for all of us if it had been a defeat.

Authored by: Gregory Thorp

The largest Gothic cathedral in the Western Hemisphere has the strangest stained-glass windows in the world

Authored by: The Editors

The author of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ never set foot on our shores, but he had a clear and highly personal vision of what we were and what we had been

Authored by: The Editors

At one time or another, practically every American artist has brought forth a blossom.

Authored by: The Editors

For millions of women, consciousness raising didn’t start in the 1960s. It started when they helped win World War II.

Featured Articles

Famous writers including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts turned Sleepy Hollow Cemetery into our country’s first conservation project.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.

Roast pig, boiled rockfish, and apple pie were among the dishes George and Martha enjoyed during the holiday in 1797. Here are some actual recipes.

Born during Jim Crow, Belle da Costa Greene perfected the art of "passing" while working for one of the most powerful men in America.