Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
Culture
The author sent dozens of historians to the movies to find out how much and how well films could teach us about the past.
I‘d long suspected that colleagues in the profession shared my illicit interest in historical movies; their detailed contempt, like mine, betokened intimate familiarity.
A distinguished scholar of American literature discusses why, after a career of study and reflection, he believes that Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman are bad for you.
Quentin Anderson, Julian Clarence Levy Professor in the Humanities Emeritus at Columbia University, argues in his best-known book, The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History, that the writings of three of our m
A few years ago, I served as one of the historical advisers for the movie Glory, which told the story of the 54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry and its brave and calamitous attack on Fort Wagner in the summer of 1863.
World War I made the city the financial capital of the world. Then, after World War II, a very few audacious painters and passionate critics made it the cultural capital, as well. Here is how they seized the torch from Europe.
Mark Tansey is a definitively post-modernist painter. His pictures stand at two removes from nature; not art but art history (or art theory) is his subject. Tansey deals in theories and notions, presenting them with the sort of sharp irony found in editorial-page cartoons.
For a sense of the continuity of the of the terrorist tradition in America, consider this actual sequence of events: The FBI smashes a dead-serious plot to overthrow the federal government and reveals that, for more than a year, the right-wing militias involv
A luminously written inquiry into the history of one man’s family turns out to be about all of us.
I have been haunted by the same nightmare for some 20 years now. In it, I am running through long dimly lit corridors in a basement somewhere. My father’s father is said to be dying in a room off one of them.
For a moment between the terrors of her childhood and the terrors of the talkies, she was America’s most successful movie actress.
All her mature life, Clara Bow had insomnia nothing could relieve—not sedatives, liquor, endless psychiatric intervention, electric shock therapy.
Woodstock, Vermont owes its appeal as much to the legacy of its residents as to its natural setting.
It’s possible to feel a trifle uneasy in the seductive presence of Woodstock, Vermont. “Woodstock is Hollywood’s image of Vermont,” the mayor of a less favored nearby community said recently.
During a single decade, Chicago invented modern organized crime and saw John Dillinger, the most famous of the hit-and-run freelancers, die in front of one of its movie houses. For those who know where to look, quiet streets and sad buildings still tell the story of an incandescent era.
A .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol fires a half-ounce lead cylinder at a speed of 579 miles per hour. If the bullet strikes a brick, it leaves a distinctive mark, a gouge surrounded by radiating cracks.
Timing is everything in music and in business. Jerome Kern demonstrated this twin truth in the most impressive way.
As it does with bowerbirds and pack rats, the urge to collect things lies deep within the human soul, and its endless manifestations can reveal that soul in startling ways.
James T. Farrell’s greatest creation died young and took his creator’s career to the grave with him.
A special notice on the jacket of the 1932 first edition of Young Lonigan informed the public that the book was directed solely at “physicians, surgeons, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, social workers, teachers and other pers
A PAIR OF GERMAN-BORN CRAFTSMEN BEGAN BY MAKING EXUBERANT FURNITURE AND WENT ON TO SHOW A NEWLY RICH GENERATION HOW TO LIVE.
America. The industrial age. Machines, steam, and iron. The picture of progress. But also a nation in mourning. Mourning its Civil War dead, mourning its loss of innocence, and deeply ambivalent about the forces of change.
An Interview with Walter Cronkite
As the editors discovered right at the outset of planning this issue, it is all but impossible to think about the course of the past 40 years without also thinking about Walter Cronkite.
A wide range of historians, writers, and public figures reflect on “the most important, or interesting, or overlooked way in which America has changed"
Twenty years ago, when I was a sophomore at Brown University, it seemed to me that not much had changed in the world during my lifetime.
You’ve probably never heard of them, but these ten people changed your life. Each of them is a big reason why your world today is so different from anyone’s world in 1954.
For want of nails, kingdoms are won and lost. We all know that. The shoe slips, the horse stumbles, the army dissolves in retreat. But who designed the nails? Who hammered the nails? Who invented the nail-making machinery?
An American Heritage veteran looks at our first year to see what four decades have done to our subject.
Happy Birthday, American Heritage! I say it with a certain avuncular pride, for, though I am not among the magazine’s first contributors, I come close.
Forty years changed almost everything, but not the author’s gleaming, troubling memories of Miss Clark. So, he went looking for her.
A student strolling through the Nassau Inn down the block from Princeton University one January day last winter would not have taken particular note of two older people having lunch in one of the Tap Room’s booths.
The most powerful columnist who ever lived single-handedly made our current culture of celebrity, and then was destroyed by the tools he had used to build it.
“WHY WALTER WINCHELL?” I have been asked repeatedly during the years I have been working on a biography of him. Why someone so passé or someone so beneath contempt as also to be beneath biography?
Our column “My Brush With History” is just a month shy of its fifth birthday, and it’s a very healthy youngster.
It’s the fastest-growing music in America. It’s a three-billion-dollar-plus industry. Cable stations devoted to it reach 62,000,000 homes. And yet, says one passionate follower of country music past and present, its story is over.
Country music is one of those phenomena that remind us how much we’ve packed into the twentieth century, for it is younger than many of our parents. This is its story.
What happened when a historian largely indifferent to the subject set out to write the script for Ken Burns’s monumental new documentary
I’VE NEVER LIKED BASEBALL MUCH, IN part because my father has always loved it so.
I first met the writer whose essay on the American press dominates this issue one afternoon more than twenty years ago.
Their unwilling subjects considered the tabloid photographers pushy and boorish. But they felt they were upholding a grand democratic tradition.
In 1928, the New York Daily News recruited Tom Howard, a Chicago Tribune photographer who was unknown to New York law-enforcement authorities.
The American newspaper: beleaguered by television, hated both for its timidity and its arrogance, biased, provincial, overweening, and still indispensable. A Hearst veteran tells how it got to where it is today, and where it may be headed.
By general consensus the first attempt to start a regularly published newspaper in America was Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, issued in Boston on September 25, 1690.
I remember hearing that, back when American Heritage began, there was a certain amount of fretting on the part of the editorial staff.
A veteran recalls the everyday courage of a threadbare generation.
My brother called me from Youngstown recently with a bright idea. Why not get up a three-piece band for a meeting of his musical club next month when I planned to be in town?
The great struggles of our century have all been followed by tides of revulsion: Americans decided we were mad to have entered World War I; Russia should have been our enemy in World War II; the United States started the Cold War. Now, another such tide has risen in Europe, and it may be on its way here.
History is revisionism. It is the frequent—nay, the ceaseless—reviewing and revising and rethinking of the past.
Once seen as a vice and now as a public panacea, the national passion that got Thomas Jefferson in trouble has been expanding for two centuries.
“I’m dad-gum disgusted at trying to police every half-square and every half-house,” Senator Huey Long told a radio audience in Louisiana in May 1935. “You can’t close gambling nowhere where the people want to gamble.”