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Coming Up In American Heritage

March 2023
1min read


The great fair…

A century ago, when Americans took an altogether more sanguine view of Columbus’s feat, the city that most epitomized the clamorous spirit of the industrial age threw a tremendous party commemorating it. Few events have been more emblematic of their age than Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition, and on its hundredth anniversary Donald Miller shows us both a serene vision of a sugar-white metropolis and the seething fang-and-claw city that mounted the show.

A life in crime

The modern mystery novel is as much an American invention as heavier-than-air flight. Now, one of the leading contemporary practitioners of the genre, Lawrence Block, uses his own career as a jumping-off point to examine his predecessors (they stretch back to Edgar Allan Poe) and assemble a reading list of the all-time greatest American crime novels.

Plus…

The bad news from the Chicago world’s fair: Frederick Jackson Turner announces that the American frontier is gone, thereby formulating a theory of American history that retains its potency to this day … the fight for free trade—one of the hottest issues of the 1890s—is one of the hottest issues of the 1990s. John Steele Gordon gives us the big picture … Richard Reeves suggests ways that President Clinton should definitely not make JFK his role model … and, to ensure that you are well stocked with appropriate reading material for the Fourth of July weekend, more.

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Stories published from "May/June 1993"

Authored by: Thomas Fleming

J. L. O. Tedder missed the battle, but his peacetime pursuits are heroic enough

Authored by: Nathan Ward

His Truth Goes Marching On

Authored by: Nathan Ward

She Thumped Her Last

Authored by: Nathan Ward

Yanks Make Good

Authored by: Nathan Ward

“On to Chicago”

Authored by: David Halberstam

THE STORY OF THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO IN THE 1950S HELPED CREATE THE SEXUAL LANDSCAPE WE INHABIT TODAY

Authored by: Ric Burns

The first caravans lumbered across two thousand miles of dangerous, inhospitable wilderness in 1843, the year of the Great Migration. To a surprising degree it’s still possible to follow something very like their route.

Authored by: Donna Richardson

They cost five cents more than regular comic books, and the extra nickel was supposed to buy what we now call cultural literacy. But they were controversial from the very start.

Authored by: Joseph J. Ellis

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson stood together in America’s perilous dawn, but politics soon drove them apart. Then in their last years the two old enemies began a remarkable correspondence that is both testimony to the power of friendship and an eloquent summary of the dialogue that went on within the Revolutionary generation—and that continues within our own.

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