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IN THE WORLD OF ALTERNATE HISTORY, IT ALL CAME OUT DIFFERENTLY. AND, IN AN ERA WHEN REAL HISTORY IS TAKING SOME VERY STRANGE TURNS, THE GENRE IS FLOURISHING AS NEVER BEFORE.
She was the great financier’s librarian, and a good deal more.
In 1683, the poet laureate John Dryden brought the word" biography" into the English language. He defined it as “the history of particular men’s lives.” That means a lot more than just the details of a person’s life, of course.
Decades after they were first cobbled together by enthusiastic amateurs, they are coming to be recognized as one of the supreme folk arts of the American century.
The scene was faintly outrageous. Purists turned their heads away in disgust, the unintiated gaped, and a few of the anointed smiled.
After a decade of writing about wars, elections, and other calamities, one of our best writers passes the baton.
After ten years of writing this column, I am saying a fond farewell.
THE FOUNDER, CONSIDERING HIS RACE A FAILURE, TOOK HIS OWN LIFE. BUT HIS CONTEST SURVIVED HIM, ENDURING SEVERAL BRUSHES WITH EXTINCTION TO BECOME AMERICA’S LONGEST-RUNNING SPORTS TRADITION. IT TURNS 125 THIS SPRING.
Last May, American Heritage published a collection of assessments of who or what is under-and overvalued in fields that ranged from cars to presidents to movie stars.
Should John Adams, Ebbets Field, the 60s, and Tocqueville be knocked off their pedestals? Are Ben Franklin and Bob and Ray far greater than you ever imagined? Our second annual survey asks experts in every field what reputation is the most inflated and what’s most underappreciated.
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Long after George Washington slept in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, so did George S. Kaufman, Oscar Hammerstein, Dorothy Parker, and Moss Hart.
Indian policy has always had more to do with current social thinking than with actual tribal life.
A certain deftness is necessary when writing about Indians (or Native Americans), to avoid the booby traps of overgeneralization, sentimentality, indignation, or defensiveness.
“It makes you want to go there” is our editors’ highest accolade for an article that successfully combines travel and history. We think you’ll want to visit all the places we’ve presented in this issue. I know I do.
A walk with my great-grandfather through the last foreign country in New York City
The Old South has survived along Georgia’s Antebellum Trail, where the Civil War seems to have happened only yesterday.
A faded industrial town in upstate New York is home to one of the world’s greatest concert halls.
Troy, New York has always had its sleeves rolled up to its biceps. Lying along the Hudson River and part of a metropolitan area that includes both Albany, the state capital, and Schenectady, the city marks the Erie Canal’s eastern terminus.
Small, handsome, and often beleaguered, this surprisingly cosmopolitan Maine city has had a history of clawing its way back from oblivion, and today, it’s on an upswing again.
I moved to Portland four years ago for a simple reason: After years of living and working in New York City, I was suddenly tired of the incessant noise. Portland seemed to offer me, a nature-loving city person, the best of both worlds.
“One nation is a copy of the other,” said John Adams on his first visit to the Netherlands; two centuries later, an American visitor to Holland can still trace the connection.
We are well-weaned from the delicate milk of our mother country, and inured to the difficulties of a strange and hard land,” wrote John Robinson and William Brewster in 1617.
It turns out that my great-grandfather fought to free my daughter.
David McCullough explains why he thinks that history is the most challenging, exhilarating, and immediate of subjects.
Here are 12 classic holiday movies worth seeing when you can’t sit through It’s a Wonderful Life one more time.
From law officer to murderer to Hollywood consultant: the strange career of a man who became myth
Late in his life, Henry Fonda, at dinner with a producer named Melvin Shestack, recalled meeting an old man who said he had firsthand knowledge of a memorable Fonda character, Wyatt Earp, the legendary frontier lawman of John Ford’s classic My Darli
Connections with childhood, with a way of looking at life, and with a generation that remade our world
Reflections on the Rat Pack: Many people know what they did. This is what they meant.
On January 19, 1961, at a gala in Washington’s National Armory on the eve of his Inauguration, President-elect John Kennedy made a remarkable gesture. He rose to tell the crowd, “We’re all indebted to a great Frank Sinatra.”
Samuel Johnson said that no subject is too insignificant for so insignificant an animal as man, Likewise, those who embrace the trivial often try to place their obsessions in the largest possible context.
A new book argues that Americans are deeply interested in the past, but in highly personal ways.
Musings by professional historians about their calling are rarely front-page material, but in their own way they matter. When the results of their self-scrutiny trickle down to the curricula that your children and grandchildren will be taught, they can matter a great deal.
When Jerry Seinfeld pockets $250 million for the syndication rights to his show, he should thank the man who loved Lucy.
Oscar Hammerstein I, the great theatrical impresario of the turn of the century, once famously said that “there is no limit to the number of people who will stay away from a bad play.” Hammerstein, who had his share of flops, knew what he was talking about, and his dictum remai
Every January, South Beach, the tropical-Deco capital, holds a week-long party.
A singer’s journey through the life of Irving Berlin
Like most baby boomers, I grew up hearing his songs and taking them for granted. I never gave a thought to who Irving Berlin was or how he had come to write the music that flowed through our lives.
You’ve just written a history of America from Columbus to Clinton. What do you put on the cover?
America’s very first alpine ski resort—they invented the chair lift there—is still as good as it gets.
It looks both backward to everything Hollywood had learned about Westerns, and forward to things that films hadn’t dared to do.
It is a phrase so high-concept that it ought to be the title of a movie, or at least the slogan for a marketing campaign, the ultimate coming attraction.