Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Journalism
Americans don’t hesitate to say anything they please about a public performance. But the right to do so wasn’t established until the Cherry Sisters sued a critic who didn’t like their appalling vaudeville act.
The year 1896 found Oscar Hammerstein in trouble. He was in debt, and the acts he had brought to Broadway weren’t doing well. He was desperate. “I’ve tried the best,” he is reported to have said. “Now I’ll try the worst.” So he sent for the Cherry Sisters.
The Supreme Court says the First Amendment gives newspapers the right to denounce the government, advocate revolution, attack public figures, and even be wrong. This may not be nice—but those who understand the strengths of a republic wouldn’t have it any other way.
During the summer of 1919 a group of dissident members of the Socialist party, including the radical journalist John Reed, published a manifesto in the left-wing newspaper Revolutionary Age attacking the party’s more moderate e
There’s a corner of every Americans heart that is reserved for a cartoon cat. Its name might be Garfield, Sylvester, Fritz, or Felix. But there will never be another Krazy.
In 1938, at the age of nine, I discovered one of life’s cruelest ironies: the best comic strips invariably appear in the worst newspapers.
AMERICAN CHARACTERS
Lincoln Steffens was a young reporter for the Commercial Advertiser during the late 1890’s, and he always remembered it as a grand time for a New York City newspaperman: “There was the Cuban war, the Boer war, and best of all—T
WHEN JOSEPH KNOWLES STRIPPED TO THE BUFF AND SLIPPED INTO THE MAINE WOODS IN 1913, HE HOPED TO LEAD THE NATION BACK TO NATURE.
It was raining. A forty-four-year-old man named Joseph Knowles gingerly entered an old logging road in the Dead River country of Maine.
After a varied career as a soldier, statesman, diplomat, and presidential adviser, Taylor wants to known as someone who “always did his damndest.”
Chronicler of “The Men Who Do the Dying”
During a driving rain, the American infantry company worked its way toward a German strong point rmi the outskirts of Cherbourg. Rifle and machinegun fire echoed through the deserted streets, and shells passed overhead with rustling noises before exploding.
LIFE and LOVES of the FATHER of the CONFESSION MAGAZINE
In 1950 a biographer of the elderly Bernarr Macfadden—who by then was known primarily as an octogenarian health fanatic who took a parachute jump each year on his birthday—remarked that his subject’s boyhood adventures bore “a stunning resemblance to the pulp
When old James E. Taylor exercised his powers of near-total recall to set down memories of the Shenandoah campaign, he left us a unique record of a very new, very hazardous profession
“Mr. Taylor’s entire career has been fraught with vicissitudes and picturesque adventures” —James E. Taylor
American Heritage interviews Lowell Thomas, the journalist whom Damon Runyon described as “the beau ideal of the radio fraternity, first for his complete artistry and second for his personality.
As the lights of London’s Covent Garden dimmed that early August evening in 1919, few people, including the young narrator waiting nervously in the wings, sensed the historic nature of the occasion.
Newspaper editor William Allen White once observed that “in the country town we gain in contact with our neighbors.
Oliver Jensen, who was for many years the editor of this magazine and who worked with Bruce Catton from its first publication in 1954, has written this account of what it was like to have him as a colleague. We are pleased to run it here as a tribute to our late distinguished senior editor, together with some side comments from others who enjoyed the privilege of “working with Bruce Catton.”
During November of 1896 the United States experienced its first publicized UFO flap, and it is perhaps not surprising that it should have occurred in California.
A. B. Frost faithfully recorded the woodland pursuits of himself and his affluent friends
Arthur Burdett Frost, who at the turn of the century was perhaps the best-known and most popular illustrator in America, sketched and painted his way from relatively humble beginnings to hobnobbing with the leisure class.
Albert Spalding’s middle name was Goodwill, which seemed fitting in 1888 when the baseball impresario and sporting goods king decided to take the game on a grand tour to parts of the world as yet unexposed to the glories of the American national pastime.
The Man Who Invented Himself
Jack London carved himself a special niche in the annals of American literature.
“The world is my country, to hate rascals is my religion” he once said, and for more than forty years—before he mysteriously vanished—he blasted away at the delusions, pretentions, posturings, hopes, dreams, foibles, and institutions of all mankind. His name was Ambrose Bierce …
If Ambrose Bierce, America’s first exponent of black humor, crudest epigrammist, and most terrifying teller of horror tales, is now finally coming into his own, it is because thinking Americans are finally recognizing the relevance of his vision—that America
The leak was known of old. It can afflict either a ship or a government, it invariably means that something invisible has gone wrong, and in certain cases it ends in disaster.
A trip to the Ozarks in 1910 has left us a unique record of a people by-passed by progress
The Ozarks—a young reporter from Kansas City named Charles Phelps Cushing thought in 1910—were “not stunning Rocky Mountains, just graceful old hills.
On the raw, gusty night of March 1, 1932, in the Sourland Hills of New Jersey, the twenty-month-old son of Charles A. Lindbergh and the former Anne Morrow, their first-born, was kidnapped from his nursery.
Miriam Follin had a penchant for diamonds, the demimonde, and the dramatic. She also possessed the business acumen to become one of America’s leading publishers in the nineteenth century
Riflemen lined the roofs along the parade route. Cavalry squads patrolled the intersections.
IT’S A PETRIFIED MAN!
IT’S A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY IDOL!
IT’S A HOAX!
ITS THE CARDIFF GIANT!
One morning in early November of the year 1868 three men appeared at the railroad depot in Union, New York, just outside Binghamton.
Throughout the summer and fall of 1898 a lady named Margaret E. Cody, aged seventy-five or there-about, was a reluctant guest of the county jail in Albany, New York. Mrs.
Outrageous and irreverent, publisher James Gordon Bennett shocked and delighted nearly everyone
Neither the Mrs.
FOR SEVEN DECADES OUR EBULLIENT COUSIN INSTRUCTED US ON EVERYTHING: THE BOERS, PROHIBITION, HITLER, CHARLIE CHAPLIN’S FEET, AND THE COMMON CAUSE OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES
As our image of Winston Churchill slides back into history—his hundredth birthday comes next November 30—the fine lines of his portrait begin to fade, and he is remembered by a new generation mainly as the wartime leader who intoned of blood, toil, tears, and sweat and prodded
A Little Visit to the Lower Depths via
No one, it has been said, ever really learns to accept the fact that it was a coupling by his parents that produced him. The novelist Louis Auchincloss extends this and says we can never believe in the sexuality of our grandparents.
Poe’s witticism was not meant kindly, but it was actually a compliment. Without doubt Margaret Fuller stood first among women of the nineteenth century.
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