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In This Issue

March 2023
1min read

Shirlee Taylor Haizlip’s article “Passing” reports on the outpouring of letters and calls she has received from readers of her book The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White (Simon & Schuster, 271 pages). That response testifies to the volume’s fascination and power. It is a gripping exploration of the phenomenon of “passing” as illustrated by her discovery of its devastating effects within her own family.

The work of the Herter Brothers—those master craftsmen, decorators, and cabinetmakers to the latenineteenth-century elite—is the subject of a handsome picture history from Harry N. Abrams Publishers and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Herter Brothers: Furniture and Interiors for a Gilded Age , by Katherine S. Howe, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, and Catherine Hoover Voorsanger (Abrams, 272 pages).

In this month’s “The Life and Times,” Geoffrey C. Ward recommends two recent books about Abraham Lincoln: Lincoln in American Memory , by Merrill D. Peterson (Oxford University Press, 496 pages), an engaging history of Lincoln’s changing treatment by his successive biographers, and The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America , by Mark Neely, Jr. (Harvard University Press, 207 pages), a model of scholarship and concision that takes Lincoln from humble birth to tragic death in just 207 pages.

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Stories published from "February/March 1995"

Authored by: The Editors

Hundreds and hundreds of letters have been left at the wall. This one carries a date that almost certainly is the day the event that haunts the writer took place.

Authored by: The Editors

Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific

Authored by: The Editors

George Wallace American Populist

Authored by: The Editors

The Columbia Book of Civil War Poetry From Whitman to Walcott

Authored by: The Editors

The White House in Miniature

Authored by: The Editors

Soul in the Stone Cemetery Art From America’s Heartland

Authored by: The Editors

The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes

Authored by: The Editors

Eastern State Penitentiary Crucible of Good Intentions

Authored by: The Editors

Dan Stuart’s Fistic Carnival

Authored by: The Editors

Forever Barbie The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

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

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.

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.