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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.
Whenever a new information technology has been born, there’s been somebody on hand to try to censor it.
Once again, the voice of the censor is heard in the land, and so are the contesting arguments of the civil libertarian, the artist, and the businessman who markets entertainment. It’s an old fight with a new twist.
Charles Saxon's cartoons are a definitive record of upper-class suburban life in the 1960s and ’70s.
Bessie Smith was the greatest blues singer of all time, and her influence still permeates popular music, though almost no one listens to her records. Here's an appreciation by an eminent jazz singer.
I think the most frustrating anti-climax in any big movie can be found in the final segment of Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones trilogy— Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade —when, after jousting with a Nazi column in the desert, H
Not what you may think
At one point in his 1988 book The Thirteenth Man, the former Secretary of Education Terrel Bell speaks of the decline of secondary education in America.
How a tireless impresario parlayed a cloud of smoke into several fortunes
If you walk through the business districts of American cities these days, in even the worst of weather, you will see underdressed people huddled in doorways. No, they’re not homeless; they’re smokers.
From the very beginning, American Heritage has viewed history as inseparable from the place where it unfolded. Indeed, the first words in the first issue of the magazine were not about a famous person or a great event; they were about a place.
WILLIAM JAMES’S EXHILARATING movement to sweep aside all philosophies is making a surprising comeback a century later.
In ordinary speech, pragmatism connotes practicality, commonsense, feet on the ground—virtues Americans like to think of as specifically American virtues. One thing the term does not connote is philosophical speculation.
At the height of the American avant-garde movement, Fairfield Porter’s realistic paintings defied the orthodoxy of Abstract Expressionism and risked rejection by the art world. But today, his true stature is becoming apparent: He may just be the best we have.
I’ve done The Education of Henry Adams.
What lasts a couple of seconds, ravishes the eye, and calms the soul? Americans have known since 1608.
A tugboat pushes us slowly past the waterfront of Fall River, Massachusetts. Lined up on the steel decks of two barges are twelve hundred mortars packed with explosive charges.
The Declaration of Independence is not what Thomas Jefferson thought it was when he wrote it, and that's why we celebrate it.
Can there be any truism that commands less actual belief than the one about history repeating itself? It certainly happens; but the absolute tyranny of the present makes the concept just slightly more credible than that of one’s own mortality.
It’s more than just a potent drink, and more than the inspiration for some handsome ancillary equipment. It is modern times, brought to you in a beautiful chalice.
In November 1943, as Allied leaders met in Teheran to plan the defeat of Nazism, Franklin Roosevelt asked Joseph Stalin to join in a toast. Inevitably, at that moment in history, the drink the American President offered was a dry martini.
50 years ago, serious pro basketball was born. Or at least they tried to be serious.
To Horace Albert (“bones”) McKinney, listening over the phone in his parlor on Fourth Street in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the words of Arthur Morse sounded just fine. Morse, who was part owner of the Chicago Stags franchise in the brand-new Basketball Association of America (B.A.A.), was saying, “My friend, if Yankee Stadium was built for Babe Ruth, then Chicago Stadium was built for Bones McKinney.”
The Babe and Bones in one mouthful. Not bad, even if Morse was laying it on a bit thick. But in this autumn of 1946 McKinney didn’t mind the blarney. Working as he was in the personnel department of Hanes Hosiery and in off-hours playing for the company basketball team, he found the idea of a pro game appealing. But the prospect of flying to Chicago to wrap the deal—that was another story. If the good Lord had wanted him to fly, Bones liked to say, he’d have provided wings. So McKinney left by train, stopping en route in Washington, D.C.
The trouble with having (and being) a hero
Charles A. Lindbergh, who vaulted to international fame 70 years ago this May by taking off alone one night and flying from New York to Paris in his single-engine monoplane, is buried in a small churchyard on the eastern end of the island of Maui in Hawaii.
What you don’t remember about the day JFK was shot
It was a series of sounds and images that had monumental impact and will always remain in the minds of those who watched: the bloodstained suit, the child saluting the coffin, the funeral procession to the muffled drums, the riderless horse.
The imperium of modern television advertising was born in desperate improvisation.
I tend to resist television history, especially when it’s on television. The narrator always says, “The Golden Age of …,” and there’s some grainy footage of a man dressed in women’s clothes tripping over a coffee table amid gusts of scratchy hilarity.
A life-long fascination with the stories of a famous pioneering family finally drove the writer to South Dakota in hopes of better understanding the prairie life that Laura Ingalls Wilder lived there and later gave to the world.
Poisoned, ruined, and self-cannibalized, this city is still the grandest of all boomtowns.
It’s spooky up here on the top floor of the Metals Bank & Trust Building. Shards of glass and crumbled plaster crunch underfoot, obscuring the elegant tile pattern of the corridor floor. Heavy oak doors with pebbled windows and missing knobs stand open to the hallway.
WHEN WE’RE FIGURING out where to go for lunch, history probably isn’t so important a guide as the certainty of good food or the hope of an affordable bill. Still, dining with the past can add real splendor to a meal, as J. M.
All across America, there are restaurants that serve up the spirit and conviviality of eras long past.
Mr. Henry Erkins had a flash of inspiration in 1908. He could see every detail of it in his mind.
His contemporaries saw the painter Charles Burchfield as another regionalist. Today, it seems clear that the region was the human spirit.
Toward the end of his life, Charles Burchfield wrote a description of a place that had haunted him since he was a schoolboy.
With the first flowers of spring, front gates in Charleston swing open to strangers.
I had visited Charleston, South Carolina twice over the years, touring the great house museums that summed up the glory of the eighteenth-century city, ferrying out to Fort Sumter, and dining superbly on she-crab soup and platters of shrimp.
A great and living monument to commerce, engineering, art, and human ingenuity
In 1929's You Can’t Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe wrote that “few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time, and…there was a superb fitness in the fact that the one which held it better than all others should be a railroad station