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Bela Lugosi began by playing Laertes and Romeo, only to become forever trapped in very different roles.
A gracious antebellum city of stern-wheelers and cotton money; a restless, violent city with a hot grain of genius at its heart; a city of calamity, desolation, and rebirth; a city that changed the way the whole world hears music. It’s all the same city, and it is this year’s Great American Place. Thomas Childers answers a summons to Memphis, Tennessee.
The great storyteller and famed historian lent authority and good advice to our aspiring magazine.
Henry Steele Commager, one of the greatest American historians and a friend to this magazine for many years, died at his home in Amherst, Massachusetts on March 2, at the great age of 95.
The numbers are pretty clear on who it is, but the numbers don’t begin to suggest the dimensions of this story.
The fin-de-siecle, an arbitrary phenomenon created by calendars of our own construction, elicits some mighty peculiar behavior in that biological oddball known as Homo sapiens —from mass suicides designed to free souls for union with spa
Memphis, the home of the blues, was a college of learning for me.
One day in 1946, twenty-one-year-old Riley King, of lndianola, Mississippi caught a ride on a grocery truck all the way to Memphis, about 140 miles north.
The English journalist has spent more than a decade preparing a book on this country’s role in the most eventful hundred years since the race began. He liked what he found enough to become an American himself.
I know nothing at all about Kevin Randazzo, except that, three summers ago, he was 18 years old and had a job taking tickets and helping children onto the wooden horses at Nunley’s Carousel and Amusements in Baldwin, Long Island, and that, when, at the end of the 1995 season, t
Why, with cigarette smoking under attack everywhere, does everyone still light up on the movie screen?
There was a “Nightline” a while back during which Jeff Greenfield delivered a puzzled examination of smoking in the movies.
FOR 70 YEARS, HE HAS DEFINED HOW WE SEE THE WORLD OF THEATER.
They are not a particularly remarkable pair of eyes: chocolate brown, droopy-lidded, shaded by thick salt-and-pepper brows.
I don’t believe I’m misquoting Jacques Barzun too violently in paraphrasing an austere dictum of his this way: “How do amateurs write? Badly, always.” Any editor will acknowledge the hard kernel of truth in this rule, but of course there are exceptions.
When the lives of a failed prizefighter, an aging horsebreaker, and a bicycle-repairman-turned-overnight-millionaire converged around a battered little horse named Seabiscuit, the result captivated the nation and transcended their sport.
On a drab Detroit side street in August 1936, two hitchhikers hopped down from their last ride and walked onto the backstretch of Fair Grounds Racecourse.
In a tranquil Cape Cod village, the past is writ in glass.
A tourist’s itinerary published by the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce deals briskly with the Cape’s oldest town: “11:00 A.M. Arrive Sandwich, Visit Sandwich Glass Museum, Dexter Grist Mill, Shawme Pond.
It has been a little under a decade since the editors here pestered a group of historians and journalists with these questions: “1.) In all of American history, whom do you consider the single most overrated public figure?
Is Robert E. Lee getting a free ride? Is it time someone spoke up for Richard Nixon? And does anyone have the lonely courage to say that most barbecue is greasy filth? There are exaggerated reputations in every field of American history, and overlooked ones, too. We asked the experts to choose which is which.
How a highly historic 18th-century Connecticut house learned to live in harmony with a 20th-century garden that is the only surviving American design of a great British landscape architect.
When, last October, the editors announced the First Annual Great American Place Award —and chose Saratoga Springs, New York, as its recipient—we invited our readers to send us their own suggestions for Great American Place.
Eureka, California came of age at the peak of our national infatuation with architectural ornament, when money and timber seemed certain to last forever.
I told myself I was going for the trees. Humboldt County, in the northwestern corner of California, is part of a narrow five-hundred-mile stretch that is the only place in the world where coast redwoods grow.
When Irma Rombauer finally found a publisher for her famous cookbook, her troubles began in earnest.
Every business has its idiosyncrasies. The Christmas-tree business is the world’s most seasonal. The commercial-airplane business requires an enormous capital investment in order to bring a single new product to market.
Have Americans slid backward since the sunny, prosperous years after World War II, as so many feel? To find out, an English-born historian compares our recent past with earlier times, and, in the process, learns something about our likely course into the next century.
In attempting to tell the story of our century by retrieving the subtlest nuances of the past, a historian makes an audacious foray into a new sort of literature.
“Very early,” writes the distinguished historian John Lukacs in the introduction to A Thread of Years, his 20th—and certainly his most unusual—book, “I was inspired by the recognition of the inevitable overlapping of history and literatu
Now, 1998 is upon us, and it seems years closer to the millennium than did 1997. There’s no reason this should he the case—just as there’s no reason, strictly speaking, why the turn of the century should be celebrated in the year 2000. As Dr.
He showed the way to the future, and then was stranded there, at odds even with his own aesthetic sensibility.
If a single building type can—and should—be identified with twentieth-century American architecture, it is the skyscraper.
Visiting the Tampa area’s turn-of-the-century Cuban and Greek communities
The young man dressed in a monk’s costume chats with me as he hands out candy to children celebrating Guavaween.
A LIFETIME AGO, A QUIET STRANGER passed through the author’s hometown and came away with a record of both personal and national importance.
FOR HALF A CENTURY, THE PICTURES HAD BEEN POPPING UP occasionally in books or magazines—razor-sharp black-and-white images of life in our little East Texas farm town in the 30s.
He was in the vanguard of that wave of young Britons who, in the 1960s, stormed our shores and gave us back our musical heritage.
I always used music. Pop songs were my escape chute from the austerity of postwar Britain, a drab and flaccid land where I wore thick, long underwear and Wellington boots, where I was always saying good-bye to my parents and trying not to cry.
Every April, we give over the whole magazine to the theme of traveling with a sense of history; but otherwise, we tend to be leery of single-topic issues. After all, if the subscriber isn’t interested in the topic, all that our efforts have won us is some mild ill will.
I asked one of the guests to take the helm while I went to check the engine.
During the summer of 1948, I was captain of a sightseeing boat taking tourists for a waterfront view of the nation’s capital. The boat was available for charter, and, in the days before air conditioning, it was popular with Washington hostesses giving evening parties.
When I was a kid, I had a nervy dad whose dream had been to make it in professional sports, preferably baseball.
Traditions nearly 500 years old underlie San Antonio’s month-long celebration.
I know I get sentimental about the holiday for which I was named, but I could have sworn that the stuffed “Pancho Claus” on a balcony above San Antonio’s lovely River Walk winked at me.