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“Ordered from Joe 6 winter yellow legs (greater). New shape and bigger. Paid him $2.” So reads the diary of one Herbert F. Hatch for Friday, July 15, 1898.
A veteran columnist who defies summarization has published a dazzling new compendium of his work.
To be a real New Yorker—an especially important goal for those of us who were neither born nor raised here—is to remain cool in the presence of celebrities.
Willie Morris interviews William Ferris, a connoisseur and chronicler of everything Southern.
William Ferris, fifty-two years old, is a prolific writer in folklore, American literature, fiction, and photography and is co-editor of the monumental Encyclopedia of Southern Culture .
Willie Morris interviews William Ferris, a connoisseur and chronicler of everything Southern.
William Ferris, fifty-two years old, is a prolific writer in folklore, American literature, fiction, and photography and is co-editor of the monumental Encyclopedia of Southern Culture .
“The public, so far as it knew of our playing, was shocked.”
Frisbees sail about in the Circle now, tossed by students in their jeans and sneakers, or cutoffs and shorts with tank tops when Poughkeepsie’s weather permits. So it’s true, kind of: The more things change, the more they remain the same.
Once the very heart of downtown St. Louis, Union Station has come through hard times to celebrate its 100th birthday, and ,even though the trains don’t pull in here anymore, it’s still an urban draw.
Cooperstown, New York, is famous for its fiction - The Last of the Mohicans, The Deerslayer, and the Abner Doubleday myth.
The name of this column is “History Happened Here,” but in the case of Cooperstown, “History Didn’t Happen Here” might be better. This is not to say that Cooperstown has no history; in fact, it has enough for half a dozen villages its size.
Baby pictures make up a large proportion of submissions to this feature. All of them are engaging, but few leap from the page—and the past—as this one does. Dr. Richard R. Rutter, of Burlingame, California, explains:
The strange saga of a town that bragged, burned, and bullied itself into existence, and then became one of the most civilized places on Earth.
I’m a newcomer to Puget Sound, but I’ve lived here long enough to know not to brag about Seattle.
Americans invented the grand hotel in the 1830s, and, during the next century, brought it to a zenith of democratic luxury that makes a visit to the surviving examples the most agreeable of historic pilgrimages.
At the turn of the eighteenth century, a story went around Connecticut about a pious old woman who was berating her nephew for being such a rake. And an aging rake, at that. “But we’re not so very different,” he insisted.
Before there was William Faulkner, there was the small Southern universe of Oxford, Mississippi.
The trouble with coming to Mississippi in winter is that, throughout his writing, William Faulkner has rarely pictured it that way for you. He almost always has that heavy summer air over everything, and you would not imagine these crisp brown January lawns.
Working for a magazine is the perfect job for a dilettante, a dabbler in history.
Sometimes, when someone asks me why I like working for this magazine, I say it’s the perfect job for a dilettante. I’m a dilettante—a dabbler in history—and I’m glad.
Ethel Waters was an innovative and terrifically influential singer, and she broke through racial barriers in movies, theater, nightclubs, radio, film, and television, opening doors for everyone who came after her. She deserves to be much better remembered.
The greatest nostalgia of all is that which we feel for what we have never known,” an elderly English journalist told me when I wondered aloud why I, a 1960s rock ’n’ roll child, had become obsessed with 1930s jazz.
Henry Rathbone shared Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theatre; it destroyed his life as surely as it had the president’s.
It was a legend of myth and fear, this bloodied gown visited by ghosts. It had formed the subject of a short book.
The mail he received reminds us anew of how little praise he received, and how philosophically he bore abuse.
On March 3, 1865, the day before Abraham Lincoln was to be sworn in for the second time as President, a New York private named William Johnson, just one of the thousands of Federal troops who had voted for their Commander-in-Chief, mailed him a gift, along with a painfully scra
A month or so ago, I found myself having lunch with a group of television executives at the Pen & Pencil, a classic 60-year-old Manhattan steakhouse that survives and, indeed, seems to prevail in a pallid age of tofu and turkey burgers.
The great democratic art form got off to a very rocky start. People simply didn’t want to crowd into a dark room to look at a flickering light, and it took nearly 20 years for Americans and motion pictures to embrace each other.
On July 5, 1896, the Los Angeles Times greeted the imminent arrival of Thomas Alva Edison’s moving-picture projector with enormous enthusiasm: “The vitascope is coming to town.
Terrorists armed with high explosives have been busy on our shores lately. America has weathered such attacks before.
“Dynamite! of all the good stuff, this is the stuff. Stuff several pounds … into an inch pipe … in the immediate neighborhood of a lot of rich loafers … and light the fuse. A most cheerful and gratifying result will follow.
A fine documentary on the Great Depression, an admirable accompanying book, and a truly wretched biography
It has been six years since Henry Hampton’s extraordinary six-part documentary series Eyes on the Prize first ran on public television and reminded us, as nothing ever had before, of the role that ordinary citizens—black and white, but m
The great Louisiana bluesman made his first recordings inside Angola Penitentiary.
While working on The Civil War series for television several years ago, I spent a fair amount of time browsing through the collection of conversations with ex-slaves recorded between 1936 and 1938 by interviewers working for the Works Pr
There was a miraculous and all-conquering horse, a filly, not a colt, who in nine out of ten races broke or equaled speed records that had stood for years and decades, who in fire and presence and appearance was Black Beauty personified, and was, the author of
“The Almighty dollar,’ Washington Irving wrote, was the “great object of universal devotion” among Americans.
There is an important 1884 book with a very long title: The Field of Honor: Being a Complete and Comprehensive History of Duelling in All Countries.
THE 1893 WORLD’S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION WAS SO WONDERFUL THAT EVERYBODY HOPED IT WAS A PROPHECY OF WHAT THE TWENTIETH CENTURY HELD IN STORE. BUT IN FACT, THE CITY THAT MOUNTED IT WAS.
“The world’s greatest achievement of the departing century was pulled off in Chicago,” said George Ade, one of the city’s first important writers.
A hot August night a decade ago found me in my stepson Geoff's’s room grappling with a tough First Amendment issue. He was away for the evening, and I had entered his domain of early-adolescent squalor to retrieve a shirt he’d borrowed from me.
The generation that fought World War II also won a housing revolution that promised and delivered a home for $7990.
After the fall of his financial empire, William Levitt remembered with some satisfaction the story of a boy in Levittown, Long Island who finished his prayers with “and God bless Mommy and Daddy and Mr. Levitt.” Levitt may well have belonged in this trinity.
I have a personal fondness for works about the great World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.
They cost five cents more than regular comic books, and the extra nickel was supposed to buy what we now call cultural literacy. But they were controversial from the very start.
Along with baseball cards and other ephemera, Classics Illustrated have become pricey nostalgia items for those who grew up in the supposedly halcyon years after World War II.