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One of the most impressive items in the FORBES Magazine Collection is a wonderful letter that John Adams wrote in June 1817 to a historian named William Tudor.
I came by my love of history naturally, for both my grandfathers were passionately fond of the subject and learned in it.
Established in 1949, the National Trust for Historic Preservation concentrates most of its efforts on advising and assisting local preservation groups.
The U.S. Capitol stands where it always has, but the columns that originally held it up have become a hauntingly beautiful monument somewhere else.
One of the most recent and most impressive monuments in Washington, D.C. is in fact nearly two centuries old. Three miles east of the Capitol, the U.S.
I’ve recently moved up in the world, from the tenth floor to the seventeenth, and four blocks closer to the Hudson River, a slate gray slice of which I can just see from where I’m writing.
THIS SPRING, THE 250TH ANNIVERSARY OF JEFFERSON’S BIRTH, RESTORATION BEGINS ON POPLAR FOREST, WHICH HE ONCE CALLED “THE BEST DWELLING HOUSE IN THE STATE, EXCEPT THAT OF MONTICELLO.” WHILE THE WORK PROGESSES, THE HOUSE IS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, AND ITS GHOSTLY EMPTINESS HEIGHTENS THE SENSE OF ITS ORIGINAL OCCUPANT.
Only rarely did Thomas Jefferson speak directly of his second home, Poplar Forest, referring rather to “my property in Bedford” or employing some other casual euphemism.
Our “Winter Art Show” made its debut early in the February/March 1986 issue, but its wellsprings are far, far older.
Theodore Dreiser’s stark realism brought the American novel into the 20th century. He paid a heavy price for his candor.
Theodore Dreiser dominated the American literary landscape in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
It opened 50 years ago and changed Broadway forever.
Only in retrospect does it seem surprising that there were empty seats in the St. James Theatre the night Oklahoma! opened, on March 31, 1943.
How are we to win our national struggle with cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and other illegal drugs? Everyone agrees that drug-related problems are a plague on our society, destroying lives, helping wreck neighborhoods, poisoning schools, feeding crime, bleeding the economy.
For years, people have argued that France had the real revolution and that ours was mild by comparison. But now, a powerful new book argues that the American Revolution was the most sweeping in all history. It alone established a pure commercial culture that makes America the universal society we are today.
The French Revolution followed American independence by six years, but it was the later event that went into the books as “the Great Revolution” and became the revolutionary archetype.
A Romanesque mansion in Chicago was built to forbid outsiders, while providing a warm welcome to guests.
Imagine the media sensation that would result if, say, Donald Trump were to be gunned down in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel by a Rockefeller who had taken up with Maria Maples.
“Good fiction writers,” says the author, “write the kind of history that good historians can’t or don’t write.”
“What if many of a so-called Fact were little better than a Fiction?” asked Carlyle.
The great Czech composer arrived on these shores a century ago and wrote some of his most enduring masterpieces here. Perhaps more important, he understood better than any American of the day where our musical destiny lay.
"I did not come to America to interpret Beethoven or Wagner for the public. That is not my work and I would not waste any time on it. I came to discover what young Americans had in them and to help them express it.”
For 150 years, a crenelated Gothic Revival castle in Connecticut has housed an art collection that was astonishing for its time, and remains so.
We tend to identify the first American public display of art with the post-Civil War surge of wealth called the Gilded Age.
That’s what everyone agreed. Jim Thorpe was at the 1912 Olympics, but legend had to make him even more, and draconian rules had to take it all away
Born in 1888 to an Indian father and French mother, Thorpe is best known for winning the pentathlon and the decathlon at the 1912 Olympics, and for his exploits in football and baseball. WikimediaAmericans have always demanded that their heroes be more than human. George Washington had to have thrown the dollar across the Potomac, Davy Crockett had to have wrestled a grizzly, Babe Ruth had to have come through for a dying boy with a promised home run. We all know that these stories are Sunday truths, but somehow the men wouldn’t be the same without them.
An Art Deco masterpiece struggles to survive
Just outside Denver, a small family-run amusement park is clanging and sparkling its way through its 84th season. It shares the raffish, plaintive charm of its counterparts across the country, but there is a good deal more to Lakeside.
On the hundredth anniversary of the unsolved double-murder of Andrew and Abby Borden, is it time to ask: What was going on in Lizzie Borden's family?
Our ancestors look gravely and steadily upon things that we cannot.
In the course of this lethal century, death has been rendered increasingly abstract—a choreographed plunge on the television screen, the punch of a red button in a bomber or a computer game, a statistic in a column of print.
The Colonial Revival was born in a time of late-19th-century ferment, and, from then on, the style resurfaced every time Americans needed reassurance.
What would you do if you owned a Rembrandt that had been painted over by Picasso?
Every spring, 30,000,000 Americans watch the Indianapolis 500. It’s the nation’s premier racing event and the pinnacle of a glamorous, murderous epic that stretches back nearly a century.
May is a month of traditions: of flowers and commencements, of the Kentucky Derby for 117 years and Indianapolis five-hundred-mile races for 81. For an automobile race, Indy is ancient.
Tom Mix, my all-time hero, lifted me up and sat me on Tony.
The year was 1932; the country, like most of the world, was in the depths of the Depression. I was seven years old. My brush with history began one day when I heard my dad call my name as he burst through the back door. I thought: What have I done now?
The fiercest struggle going on in education is about who owns the past. Passionate multi-culturalists say that traditional history- teaching has brushed out minority ethnic identities. Their opponents say that radical multi-culturalism leads toward national fragmentation.
In 1987, a sweeping revision of the social studies program in New York State public schools gave the curriculum a strong multicultural slant.
Americans have never been comfortable with class. We like to think of ourselves as egalitarian, meritocratic.
75 years ago this month, a not-especially-good band cut a record that transformed our culture.
About 325,000 jazz performances have been recorded for commercial release in the 20th century, according to the Institute for Jazz Studies, at Rutgers University. Thousands more have been taken from radio and concert events.
Desperate improvisations in the face of imminent disaster saw us through the early years of the fight. They also gave us the war’s greatest movie.
America’s favorite World War II movie has led a charmed life. While it was being filmed, each looming disaster turned out to be a cleverly disguised blessing, and after its completion everything that could go right did go right.
Blest be the man that spares these stones, And curst be he that moves my bones.
Some people think that the history of boxing as a glamorous business, as promotion rather than as sport, begins with Muhammad Ali and Don King. Before Ali, they say, boxing was I just a bunch of palookas punching each other.