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Our Winter Art Show

March 2023
1min read

Winslow Homer painted the Old Drover’s Inn in 1887 (left), a few years after he and his family moved to Prout’s Neck, Maine. The pastoral subject matter is exceptional among Homer’s work there—most of his scenes were of the sea and fishermen. In the end, it’s the cows, not the house, that make this watercolor a triumph; few artists are able to impart animation to such stolid animals. Cows were a banal fact of life in Homer’s America, but he saw their beauty.

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Stories published from "February/March 1986"

Authored by: The Editors

A set of turn-of-the-century glass-plate negatives bought at an auction prompted a New York photographer to set off for central Ohio to document architectural and social change

Authored by: Bernard Bailyn

Just before the Revolution, newly studied documents reveal, the flight of British subjects to the New World forced a panicky English government to wrestle with this question

Authored by: Brock Yates

A leading authority picks the top ten. Some of the names still have the power to stir the blood. And some will surprise you.

Authored by: Robert V. Remini

On the 150th anniversary of Texan independence, we trace the fierce negotiations that brought the republic into the Union after ten turbulent years

Authored by: William Broyles, Jr.

The Lone Star state as it once was—proud, isolated, independent, the undiluted essence of America forever inventing itself out of the hardscrabble reality of the frontier

Authored by: Tom Swafford

It took place in 1948, and it was orchestrated—with difficulty—by the program director of a faltering Portland, Oregon, radio station. He persuaded two Republican candidates to argue formally about an actual issue with no intervening moderator.

The idealists who founded this Utopian colony were singularly well versed in mystical philosophy— and singularly ignorant about farming

Authored by: Wenhui Hou

After a year at the University of Missouri boning up on American history, a Chinese professor tells what she discovered about us and how she imparts her new knowledge to the folks back home in the People’s Republic.

Authored by: Jerome Tarshis

A former Department of Defense adviser—one of Robert S. McNamara’s Whiz Kids—explains why we tend to overestimate Russian strength, and why we underestimate what it will cost to defend ourselves

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. 

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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.