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In This Issue

March 2023
1min read


For information about subscribing to the Prodigy on-line service, which carries the weekly American Heritage Picture Gallery feature (described in this month’s Letter From the Editor), call 1-800-PRODIGY. Prodigy also offers a host of news, shopping, reference, entertainment, and chat services and full Internet access. Madeline Rogers, who is in charge of American Heritage Picture Gallery , is also the editor of Seaport magazine, put out three times a year by the South Street Seaport Museum. Seaport takes as its subject several centuries of New York waterfront life, covering the history of everything from speakeasies, dance halls, and sailors’ brothels to the New York Yacht Club and the Port Authority. Two decades old, it demonstrates that there’s far more to the city’s maritime culture than scrimshaw and dirty songs. A thirty-five-dollar three-issue subscription to Seaport also buys you a museum membership. The museum is at 207 Front Street in Manhattan (212-748-8600).

As Viola Hopkins Winner’s feature on Henry Adams and the automobile makes clear, few of Adams’s thoughts went unrecorded, and very little of his correspondence isn’t graceful and original. His collected letters from this period, in which he makes his peace with the car and the worse shocks of the new century, are published by Harvard University Press in The Letters of Henry Adams: Eighteen Ninety-two to Nineteen-eighteen , volumes 4–6 (2,400 pages).

For more about the Shakers at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky (the subject of this month’s travel column), and at other settlements around the country, try Architecture of the Shakers , by Julie Nicoletta (Countryman Press, 176 pages). Her subject is broader than the title suggests: The chapter on dwelling houses describes life in Shaker residences, and the one on offices and stores details the Shakers’ business dealings with the outside world. By the 1860s, she writes, the Shakers were selling their furniture wholesale to stores in Boston and New York; by the 1880s the demand for their chairs was so great that Shakers in Mount Lebanon, New York, flouted the sect’s strict laws governing separation of the sexes and let men and women work side by side to speed up production rather than turn away income. Even as they created a market for simple, virtuous designs, the Shakers themselves occasionally succumbed to the desire to display a little wealth and sophistication: After a cyclone had destroyed the Trustees Office in Union Village, Ohio, in 1886, it was remodeled with marble floors and sinks, a mansard roof, and a cupola. The text is illustrated with beautiful color photographs by Bret Morgan.

Geoffrey C. Ward’s column “Life and Times” takes up Ian Frazier’s Family (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 386 pages). The book is an extraordinary history of Frazier’s ordinary American clan, which he traces back to Midwestern preachers, wheelwrights, and farmers and, beyond that, to their old-world roots in Yorkshire and Scotland and Bern. Frazier sifts through the story of his family on both sides, the small and everyday no less exquisitely realized than the larger events that intrude, such as the Danbury raid in the Revolution or the Battle of Chancellorsville.

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Stories published from "July/August 1995"

Authored by: The Editors

Heart of the Land
Essays on Last Great Places

Authored by: The Editors

Russell Baker’s Book of American Humor

Authored by: The Editors

Fascinatin’ Rhythm
American Syncopation

Authored by: The Editors

The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright

Authored by: The Editors

The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl

Authored by: Hiller B. Zobel

Is trial by jury the essential underpinning of our system of justice or—as more and more critics charge—a relic so flawed it should perhaps even be abolished? An experienced trial judge examines the historical evidence in the case.

Authored by: Edward E. Leslie

Drawn to the story of the fearsome Confederate raider by a modern act of violence, the author finds a strange epic in the Rebel’s restless remains

Authored by: Jocelyn W. Knowles

Consigned to the Pennsylvania Railroad’s “Garbage Run,” they fought their own war on the home front, and they helped shape a victory as surely as their brothers and husbands did overseas

Authored by: James G. Barber

A historian of American portraits tells how he determines whether a picture is authentic—and why that authenticity matters

Authored by: Harold Holzer

A report from the field on the battle to authenticate what its owner still hopes is the earliest Lincoln photograph

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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.

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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.