Dangerous Summer

For more than a century, politicians, journalists, and Western-city boosters urged Congress to get out of the District of Columbia and take the government elsewhere.

If the historians themselves are no longer interested in defining the structure of the American past, how can the citizenry understand its heritage? The author examines the disrepair in which the professors have left their subject.

A postcard version of six tender and crucial rites of passage by the artist Harrison Fisher

With its roots in the medically benighted eighteenth century, and its history shaped by the needs of the urban poor, Bellevue has emerged on its 250th anniversary as a world-renowned center of modern medicine

A distinguished American poet recalls one of his more unusual jobs

A pictorial history of the state from discovery to the Revolution

The curiously troubled origin of a brief and fitting inscription

An outstanding American historian follows Winston Churchill through a typical day during his political exile in the 1930s and uses that single twenty-four-hour period to reveal the character of the century’s greatest Englishman in all its complexity. See Churchill lay bricks, paint a landscape, tease his dinner guests, badger his secretaries, dictate a history, make up a speech, write an article (that’s how he earns his living), refuse his breakfast because the jam has been left off the tray, refight the Battle of Bull Run, feed his fish, drink his brandy, fashion a “bellyband” to retrieve a particularly decrepit cigar, recite all of “Horatius at the Bridge,” take two baths—and await with noisy fortitude the day when he will save the world.

The first settlers marked the borders of their lives with simple fences that grew ever more elaborate over the centuries