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Coming Up In American Heritage

March 2023
1min read

A portion of the next issue is devoted to notable American women—and to looking at the changes that have overtaken the lives of all American women. The stories include:

Let them all be damned—I’ll do as I please…”

So said Georgia O’Keeffe, and what she pleased was to produce a body of coolly ardent paintings that put her in the vanguard of this century’s American artists. Up until her death last year, at the age of ninety-eight, she played the invincible loner with increasing authority and conviction. But the truth was more interesting, as Edward Abrahams reveals in a portrait of O’Keeffe’s early years.

The Peabody sisters…

These three New England women led very different lives—one was a reformer, one was deeply in love with Nathaniel Hawthorne, one waited ten years for Horace Mann to get over his grief for his first wife. Each was fascinating in her own right, and taken together their lives reveal a great deal about the choices women have always faced.

Less work for mother? …

During the first half of this century, households were transformed by an influx of new machines that came to be known as appliances. Each looked like a powerful engine of liberation, but somehow housewives kept on working just as much. Ruth Cowan tells why.

When Presidents err …

In the light of the Iran-Contra imbroglio, an examination of earlier scandals under Grant, Harding, and Nixon suggests how familiar the pattern of folly really is.

Plus …

College football in hot water three-quarters of a century ago (it makes SMU look like pretty small potatoes: people were dying ) … a fond profile of the morose and hilarious radio comedian Fred Allen, who saw his work as a “treadmill to oblivion” … an intimate memoir by one of the men who sat on the court-martial of the only American soldier shot for desertion in World War II … the Paris Herald Tribune turns one hundred, and Richard Reeves pays a birthday tribute to the singular journal that has always been the hometown paper for every American in Paris … the three men who wouldn’t sign the Constitution … gorgeous gifts from Tiffany’s past … and, although it would hardly seem possible in the compass of a single issue, more.

We hope you enjoy our work.

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Stories published from "July/August 1987"

Authored by: The Editors

A picture taken the day before President Roosevelt’s death has been hidden away in an artist’s file until now

Authored by: Joseph H. Ewing

Extraordinary correspondence, never published before, takes us inside the mind of a military genius. Here is William Tecumseh Sherman in the heat of action inventing modern warfare, grieving the death of his little boy, struggling to hold Kentucky with levies, rolling invincibly across Georgia, and—always—battling the newspapermen whose stories, he believes, are killing his soldiers.

Authored by: The Editors

During the Depression, itinerant photographers hawked their services from town to town. All we know about this one is that he passed through Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1934. And that he was very good indeed.

Authored by: Annie Dillard

She played the war, learning to creep through the woods without leaving footprints or snapping twigs. She read and dreamed about the war, lying on her bed, limp with horror and delight. The history of the war was a drug and she was an addict.

Authored by: Alfred M. Bingham

In July 1911 the author’s father climbed a remote ridge in Peru to discover, amid an almost impenetrable jungle, the fabled lost city of Machu Picchu, last capital of the Inca Empire. Or so the story goes.

Authored by: Peter Andrews

Their High Command abandoned them. Their enemy thought they wouldn’t fight. But a few days after Pearl Harbor, a handful of weary Americans gave the world a preview of what the Axis was up against.

Authored by: Fred Strebeigh

Born in response to the shoddy, machine-made goods available in the marketplace, the Arts and Crafts movement in America began in isolated workshops and spread to the public at large, preaching the virtues of the simple, the useful, and the handmade

Authored by: Roger T. Pray

The penitentiary was invented in the United States as a more rational and humane way of punishing. It quickly ran into problems that still overwhelm us.

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