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AFTER TRYING TO PRODUCE DRINKABLE WINE for 300 years, we finally got the hang of it ... so effectively that, in the last quarter-century, our results have raised the quality of winemaking all over the world.
A GENERATION AGO, THE United States was little more than an afterthought in the world of wine. America certainly had a long history of grape growing and winemaking, but that history hardly mattered. Nor did the wine itself much matter.
ROBERT MOSES built small with the same imperial vigor as he built big, and, at his behest, the art of making scale-model cities reached its peak. The result still survives, and, although few New Yorkers know about it, they can see their whole town, right down to their own houses or apartment buildings, perfectly reproduced.
THERE ARE FEW REMINDERS THAT TWO WORLD’S FAIRS were held in New York’s Flushing Meadow.
Five centuries of American hangovers, and the single greatest faux pas in New York City history
The New York Times
In New Bern, North Carolina, enjoy the holidays in 1770 and 1830 and 1940.
Under a dome of stars emerging from the darkening twilight, the air has a Christmasy nip to it and carries the scent of fires in nearby fireplaces, but the breeze is a mild Southern one.
A HALF-CENTRY AGO, Harry Dubin bought his son a camera, and, together, they made a remarkable series of photographs of a city full of blue-collar workers.
WILL ROGERS MAY NEVER HAVE MET A MAN HE DIDN’T like, but Harry Dubin evidently never met one he didn’t like to be.
What it was like to be young and on the front lines when Europe mounted an assault on Detroit with small, snarling, irresistible machines that changed the way we drove and thought
WHAT’S THE POINT OF BEING A BOY IF YOU DON’T GRASP THE FACT that cars are the package that excitement comes in? I certainly did.
IN 1896, TWO ILLINOIS BOYS WHO HAD set up a factory in Springfield, Massachusetts, built and sold thirteen automobiles (two seats and a two-cylinder, six-horsepower engine with 138-cubic-inch displacement: $1500).
WILLIE MORRIS revisits a book that nourished him as a boy and discovers that the landscapes which the young Samuel Clemens navigated are in fact the topography of Morris’ own life.
MARK TWAIN WAS BORN ALMOST EXACTLY a century before I was into a small-town Mississippi Valley culture that, despite the centennial difference, bore remarkable resemblances to my own.
TWENTY YEARS AGO, I WAS WORKING in the American Heritage book division side by side with our (now) senior editor Jane Colihan, the two of us younger, of course, and darker-haired, and glummer.
My mother loved parades and early on imbued me with a love of same. An incident at one sticks in my mind. I believe it was in 1926 or 1927. I can’t be sure as I was only a small boy then.
ON THE ROAD DURING THE ERA OF GREATEST PERIL FOR THE ONE INDISPENSABLE AMERICAN SHOW
Last summer, while I was driving my daughter and son from Williamstown, Massachusetts, to Chatham, New York, we passed a billboard with an ad, Crayola red, blue, and yellow, announcing the arrival of a circus.
ALBERT MURRAY SEES AMERICAN CULTURE AS AN incandescent fusion of European, Yankee, frontier, and black. And he sees what he calls the “blues idiom” as the highest expression of that culture.
A CENTURY AGO, you’d eat steak and lobster when you couldn’t afford chicken. Today, it can cost less than the potatoes you serve with steak. What happened in the years between was an extraordinary marriage of technology and the market.
King Henri IV of France was a great king.
WHAT! I CAN’T BELIEVE IT! Chickens? What do they have to do with anything. Chickens!”
What human nature and the California gold rush tell us about crime in the inner city
Earl Sande was better at what he did than anybody else in his era. Then he threw it all away.
As has been said of pornography, great art is impossible of complete definition, but we know it when we see it. And the greatest athletes, as with great generals and great violinists, are master artists. A million kids play baseball. One was Babe Ruth.
DECEPTIVELY SIMPLE IN NAME AND FORM, an icon of post-modernism comes wrapped in centuries of architectural history
VANNA VENTURI USED TO SIT AT HER DINING ROOM TABLE AND TALK TO visitors about her house in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia. “This facade will tell you a lot of stories, if you will listen to it,” she would say.
People have been waiting for the great American novel ever since Civil War days. But John Dos Passos may have written it 60 years ago.
Montana’s Flathead Valley has captivated tourists for more than a century.
If you ever want to get your heart pounding, take a helicopter ride over the rugged peaks in Glacier National Park. When I did last summer, it started out calmly enough.
He was forever asking friends to find a spouse for his youngest boy. It was a different story with his girls.
Had he been a Catholic, the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, self-effacing in victory and noble in defeat, would likely today be known as St. Robert of Appomattox, idol as he was of his people, their lodestar.
TODAY, NEARLY HALF a million men and women serve two-thirds of the country in a crucial volunteer service that began only recently, and only because a nine-year-old boy had witnessed a drowning.
The alert reader (and, for that matter, the near-comatose one) will notice that this month’s cover story on American taxation arrives at a conclusion that will not be anathema to the chairman of the company that pays my salary.
THE VISITORS WHO COME HERE FOR THE OLYMPICS this summer won’t find Tara. What they will find is a city facing an unusual and sometimes painful past with clarity of vision and generosity of spirit.
Atlantic City has an intriguing past hidden behind her gambling palaces.
“GOOD FENCES MAKE GOOD NEIGHBORS,” wrote Robert Frost. But he may have been closer to the mark with another line: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”
A rich variety of fences is one of the many charms of the American landscape: the wooden rail fence of the rural Midwest and South and the picket fence of the town, crude barbed wire surrounding prairie fields and ornate iron palings protecting village lawns, the New England st
He may have been the greatest caricaturist of all time; he has imitators to this day. But his true passion was for a very different discipline.
The trouble was, he couldn’t say no to anyone.
The American master of horror fiction was as peculiar in his life as he was in his writing.
Among the presents that came Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s way during the Christmas season of 1936 was a skull from an Indian burial ground. The gift was appropriate for a lifelong connoisseur of the weird.
Three movies newly available on video cast a cold and, occasionally, even scornful eye on their subjects.
When Sunrise at Campobello, Dore Schary’s play about the crippling of Franklin D. Roosevelt, opened on Broadway, Eleanor Roosevelt and two close friends were in the audience as his guests. It is a heroic double portrait in which Mrs.