Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
Culture
In November of 1962, I was living on Pinckney Street at the top of Beacon Hill in Boston, and when, on election day, I learned that John F.
Sociologists continue to be vexed by the pathology of urban violence: Why is it so random, so fierce, so easily triggered? One answer may be found in this nation's Southern past.
A controversial recent book suggests that what we think of as good manners is a relatively new thing, a commodity manufactured to meet the needs of an industrial age. But, now that the Industrial Revolution is over, we may need them more than ever, for very different reasons.
All of us have encountered surly check-out cashiers, come up against uncivil civil servants, and witnessed rude public behavior. The couple behind us who talk through the entire movie. The stranger who lets the shop door slam in our face.
The man who may be America’s greatest artist liked to fend off the curious with the statement “My life is all in my works. ” He was right, but the works and the life take on new poignance with the release and exhibition of a once-private collection of his letters, photographs, and sketchbooks.
Thomas Eakins is now recognized as one of the greatest American painters, but in his own era his reputation was uncertain.
For more than a century now, American homeowners have been struggling to remake their small patch of the environment into a soft, green carpet just like the neighbor’s. Who told us this was the way a lawn had to be?
When it comes to lawn care, my father has always insisted on doing it the hard way. No shortcuts or modern conveniences for him.
You can rise fast and far in America, but, sometimes, the cost of the journey is hard to tally.
For a long time, I have wanted to write about a vision of my father I experienced on a New York City subway train while riding downtown to a literary meeting. As a historian, I am skeptical of visions. I pride myself on my rationality, I rely on facts.
At the dawn of this century, a new form of residential architecture rose from the American heartland, ruled by the total integration of space, site, and structure.
After dinner, Frank Lloyd Wright would sometimes raise a wine glass, watch the yellow candlelight refracted through the red liquid and crystal, and, quoting the Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu, remark that the reality of the vessel lay in the void within, “the pl
Robert Johnson died in obscurity in 1938. Since then, he has gradually gained recognition as a genius of American music. Only recently have the facts of his short, tragic life become known.
Who was Robert Johnson? For so many years, that question haunted all of us who loved the blues. Certainly, we knew about Robert Johnson’s music.
The “loser decade” that at first seemed nothing more than a breathing space between the high drama of the 1960s and whatever was coming next is beginning to reveal itself as a richer time than we thought.
That’s it,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then U.S. ambassador to India, wrote to a colleague on the White House staff in 1973 on the subject of some issue of the moment. “Nothing will happen.
In the most self-consuming of cities, an impressive and little-known architectural legacy remains to show us how New Yorkers have lived and prospered since the days when the population stood at around 1000.
Famous for tearing down the old and for being oblivious of its past, New York City would hardly seem to be the kind of place in which to find a distinguished collection of fine old houses.
"Gosh, it would be fun to play a president of the United States," said Lieutenant Reagan.
In April of 1942, I enlisted in Psychological Research Unit 3 at the Santa Ana Army Air Base.
A guide who has been taking it all in for 60 years leads us on a lively, intimate, and idiosyncratic ramble through quiet yards where students once argued about separating from the Crown, and to hidden carvings high on the Gothic towers that show scholars sleeping through class and getting drunk on beer.
"That building on the left,” said the tour guide, “is William L. Harkness Hall. It was given by Mr. Harkness in 1926 and completed in 1927. It is built of Aquia sandstone with Ohio sandstone trim.
The legend of the most notorious of all outlaws belongs to the whole world now. But, to find the grinning teenager who gave rise to it, you must visit the New Mexico landscape where he lived his short life.
New Mexico is Billy-the-Kid country. In Santa Fe’s First Presbyterian Church, young Henry McCarty stood by in March 1873 as his mother exchanged vows with William Henry Harrison Antrim. Eight years later, alias Billy Bonney, a.k.a.
When you’re lining up a putt on the close-cropped green, there are ghosts at your shoulder. More than any other game, golf is played with a sense of tradition.
The oldest golf joke I know is one about the player who threw his clubs into the ocean after a terrible round and the next day was drowned trying to get them back again. To people who don’t play golf, this is a silly story; to those of us who do, it isn’t.
Baseball, we are told, is the American game, and much earnest nonsense has been written about how its attributes mystically reveal the American character. Baseball mirrors American life, it is said.
A small but dependable pleasure of travel is encountering such blazons of civic pride as “Welcome to the City of Cheese, Chairs, Children, and Churches!”
Stephen Vincent Benét confessed that he had fallen in love with American placenames, and George R.
In an age when the best black artists were lucky to exhibit their work at state fairs, Henry Ossawa Tanner was accepted by the most selective jury in France.
Dr. Philip Bellefleur had been headmaster of the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf for about three years when he found the painting in 1970.
Fewer than half of O. Henry’s short stories actually take place in New York, but we still see the city through his eyes.
For most of this century, and often against the starkest evidence, New York City has persisted in seeing itself as “Baghdad on the Subway,” an Arabian Nights swirl of color, motion, tough characters with soft hearts, soft chara
According to recent studies, alcoholics “have stronger expectations about how alcohol will affect them than other drinkers do. Alcoholics believe that alcohol transforms their personalities,” making them more relaxed, entertaining, sexually alluring.
In its majesty and in its simplicity, the Greek Revival house seemed to echo America’s belief in the past and hopes for the future.
"The two great truths in the world are the Bible and Grecian architecture.” This is what Nicholas Biddle believed and what he published in his magazine, Portfolio, in 1814.
I spent the summer of 1964, between my junior and senior years in hish school, doing yardwork for various neighbors in the village of Bronxville, New York.
For a century now, it has been a haven to some, an outrage to others, and it is one of the very few social institutions that have survived their founders’ world.
I‘m sorry, son,” said the father to his young offspring in a New Yorker cartoon some years ago, “but we WASPs have no tribal wisdom to pass on.”
One evening in the early 1950s, Oscar Hammerstein II unexpectedly encountered his Broadway partner, Richard Rodgers, at a reception. “Well, fancy meeting you here,” he said. “Who’s minding the score?” Hammerstein, like most poets, couldn’t resist a pun.
You had better shove this in the stove,” 29-year-old Sam Clemens wrote his older brother, Orion, in 1865, “for … I don’t want any absurd ‘literary remains’ & ‘unpublished letters of Mark Twain’ published after I am planted.”
Dan Patch never lost a race. But that’s not how he made his owner a multi-millionaire. America’s best-loved horse was also perhaps the most shrewdly marketed animal of all time.
In mid-September 1904, Americans reading about Teddy Roosevelt’s conquest of the Republican presidential convention and the decisive Japanese victory over the Russians at Liao-yang came across a brief news item from Kansas: Dan Patch had taken ill in Topeka a
In one of Willa Cather’s earliest novels, the heroine has been reflecting on the settlers who had come to Nebraska a generation earlier and on the great changes that have taken place in the intervening years.
In his last time at the plate, Ted Williams crushed a 440-foot home run deep to right field.
For me, the worst horror of entering a new school in the fourth grade was show-and-tell. Each morning, just after attendance, we were expected to hone our “communication skills” by giving a little talk on something that interested us.
Not every memorable historic moment is on a grand scale. Here is a look at some of the bizarre, true sidelights that add sparkle to the larger picture.
One day toward the end of his life, H. L. Mencken is said to have come upon his own obituary in the files of the Baltimore Sun. He read it through and, to the intense relief of its anxious author, pronounced it satisfactory.