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Organized crime? Mafia? A lot of people, including J. Edgar Hoover, said it was mere folklore, until one day in 1957 when an alert New York state trooper set up a roadblock in a small town. What followed was low comedy with high consequences.
BASEBALL WAS PLAYED FOR 30 YEARS BEFORE ANYONE THOUGHT ABOUT FINDING A WAY TO PROTECT PLAYERS’ FINGERS.
His first memory was of a green lampshade in his father’s study. His second was of fury and frustration. His mother, father, and older brother, Win, were going up from the Stanford University campus, where he’d been born, to San Francisco, where the fleet was.
How Southern California capitalism and one mysterious loner met, courted, married, and gave birth to our modern surfing culture
Is it a symbol of a brave past or a banner of treason? And is there perhaps another Southern standard to be raised?
“My ancestors fought for the question of who was supreme, the federal or the state government. They felt that South Carolina freely went into the Union and had the right to opt out, like an independent country.”
AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD GILDER AND LEWIS LEHRMAN
The cemetery where many of the greatest early movie stars are buried is returning to life.
On Manhattan’s Lower East Side, you can visit a haunting re-creation of a life that was, at once, harder and better than we remember.
In last year’s travel issue, we published an article on places in the Netherlands of special interest to Americans, among them Leiden, which holds a few precious remnants of the Pilgrims’ stay there.
American jazz musicians once enjoyed a freedom and respect in France’s capital that they could never win at home. Landmarks of that era still abound.
For all the books and films that have been done about painters and writers who went to Paris, far less has been written about the lives of musicians from the United States who settled there, some for a while, a few for their whole lives.
A century and a half’s worth of commercial buildings energize Philadelphia’s main drag.
Deciding to rescue a historic property is the start of what turns out to be a lifelong relationship as terrifying as it is exhilarating.
The threat was distant but definite, like cannon rumbling beyond the next ridge. Mr. and Mrs.
Like most people who make history, Clark Byers had something else on his mind.
Reform-party movements can be pretty weird in the best of times; imagine what they might have been like in the worst.
This winter, the ongoing battle for control of the Reform party began to strain credulity—not to mention the adage that politics makes strange bed-fellows.
In a century and a half, it has produced six sublime, increasingly expensive boats, and competition so ferocious that it's beginning to transcend national allegiances.
Big yachts have been sailing for the America’s Cup since 1851, which makes it the oldest international sporting trophy in continuous competition. That it has survived for so long seems to defy common sense.
A curious discovery on the Florida seashore, when a water cannon destroyed a suspicious package later found to contain miniature portraits by the celebrated American painter Gilbert Stuart
This issue of American Heritage is unlike any that has ever before been published. As you’ll see, it contains just one feature story, which is not, strictly speaking, a real story at that.
It’s one in a billion.
America entered the 20th century with its finger on the shutter of Kodak’s Brownie (“You press the button; we do the rest”).
Americans have been launching time capsules into the future for over a century now, and, today, we’re creating more than ever. Why is it that so few reach their destination? And that so many merely bore their recipients?
One of America’s greatest documentary filmmakers takes on America’s greatest city: Ric Burns discusses his new PBS series, New York.
It began in the Paris underground of World War II and evolved over 30 years into a phenomenon that so overturned cultural norms that it could not survive.
The power of his vision fused a bond between American and European art, and between the first and second halves of the century.
Now, on the left and then coming from right you’ll see the bombs. …” Of course, at first we couldn’t lift our eyes off the cross hairs on the middle of our TV screens quickly enough to see anything but the explosion billowing up at us.
How a mass killing 150 years ago made today’s New York a better place
The children are back at Columbine High School now— if they can still truly be called children after the terrible violence perpetrated upon them. We can only hope that the murder of twelve of their classmates was a random moment of madness.
Nourished by powerful rivers and an equally powerful sense of its past, a town of cowhands and poets and bikers and professors distills the whole history of the American West - its hope and rapacity, its calamities and triumphs. Fred Haefele makes clear why our third annual American Heritage Great American Place Award goes to…
The author of America’s best-loved baseball book speaks of his days as a reporter, of his time (unique among sportswriters) owning a team, and of his latest subject, Jack Dempsey, whose violent career he uses to illuminate an era.
Is there something we should be doing about this?” “This” was the airplane accident that had claimed the lives of John F.
Like so much else, they’re a product of the Industrial Revolution.
The Public Broadcasting System has a new hit on its hands for the first time in quite a while.
When I was eleven or twelve years old, I discovered, in the little library that served the Cape Cod town of Dennis, where I was spending the summer, a book about the turn-of-the-century— this century—war between Britain and France.
The word emerged during the Depression to define a new kind of American adolescence, one that prevailed for half a century and may now be ending.