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A restaurant critic who’s a food historian and the fortunate recipient of an Italian grandmother’s cooking follows the course of America’s favorite ethnic fare in its rise from spaghetti and a red-checked tablecloth to carpaccio and fine bone china.
Should the Smithsonian Institution ever wish to display an example of a prototypical Italian-American restaurant, it could do no better than to move Mario’s, lock, stock, and baròlo, from the Bronx to Washington, D.C.
The medieval look that swept America 150 years ago wasn’t just a matter of nostalgia for pointed archways and crenellated towers; it was also the very model of a modern architectural style.
The past keeps no secrets more securely than those of the stage.
What makes science fiction the literature of choice for so many? Arthur C. Clarke, the novelist and scientist, gave a good answer once, when asked why he chose to write in this genre: “Because,” he said, “no other literature is concerned with reality.”
A lifelong baseball fan recalls his early days and explains the rewards of abject loyalty.
Two months after the Pittsburgh Pirates won the World Series of 1909, my mother presented them with one of their most faithful fans—me.
American art was hardly more than a cultural curiosity in the early years of this century. Now, it is among the world’s most influential, and much of the credit belongs to a self-made woman named Juliana Force.
Today, when a painting by a living American artist fetches seventeen million dollars at auction, as a picture by Jasper Johns did last year, or when hundreds of people stand in line to get into a museum, as they did for the retrospectives of Edward Hopper, Wi
In the years between the dedication of the Statue of Liberty and the First World War, the Divine Sarah was, for hundreds of thousands of Americans, the single most compelling embodiment of the French republic.
During Sarah Bernhardt’s 1912–13 American tour, the souvenir program for La Dame aux Camélias quoted Mark Twain: “There are five kinds of actresses: bad actresses, fair actresses, good actresses, g
Stempel’s winning technique was simplicity itself: He got all the questions in advance.
In October 1956, the 29-year-old scion of an illustrious American literary family took up a suggestion that countless Americans were then making to their more erudite friends and relations.
An architecture for a new nation found its inspiration in ancient Rome.
New Yorkers recall 1939 as the year of the great World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow. But that’s just more Eastern provincialism. Take a look at what was going on in San Francisco.
A newspaper article the other day informed me that the late 1930s are back in fashion. Historical societies are girding to protect Art Deco. The clarinet of Benny Goodman is heard on compact discs.
As anyone with a family album knows, photographs rarely tell the whole truth.
Clues uncovered during the recent restoration of his house at Springfield help humanize the Lincoln portrait.
One good measure of our apparently inexhaustible interest in Abraham Lincoln is that this year eight hundred thousand of us will be led through his house at the corner of Eighth and Jackson streets in Springfield, Illinois.
The author walks us through literary Boston at its zenith. But Boston being what it is, we also come across the Revolution, ward politics, and the great fire.
Like three Bostonians out of four, I live on a site that was originally underwater. My house is on River Street, an alleyway that was built for stables at the bottom of Beacon Hill in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Wherever you travel in this country, you have a good chance of bringing a piece of the past home with you.
I drove 20,000 and got just one real bargain. That was up the Hudson River on a boisterous, wind-scrubbed October day 15 years ago.
He ignored the conventions of his day and became one of the greatest American sculptors of this century.
I find myself sketching a top hat on a snapshot I’ve taken of a former pasha’s obituary photograph.
President Wilson said that “The Birth of a Nation” was “like writing history with Lightning.” Movies have taught everybody else history, too.
When the 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty failed to enchant local audiences, a distributor begged MGM to make “no more pictures where they write with feathers.”
Our journalism is both tyrannical and slavish; it succumbs to every powerful influence, and it is bold and independent only when it attacks the weak and defenseless.… Defamation is as much a habit of the newspaper press as barking is of dogs, or hissing of serpents.… the Americ
During the late Depression years, the biggest movie star was also the littlest, Shirley Temple. “It is a splendid thing,” FDR said, “that, for just 15 cents, an American can go to a movie and look at the smiling face of a baby and forget his troubles.”
What seemed to be just another tempest in the teapot of academia has escalated into a matter of national values and politics. Who would have believed that the choice of which books Stanford University students must read would create so much tumult? And that the controversy goes back so far?
Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind must surely be the most unexpected happening of American intellectual life in recent years. It is an erudite, closely argued book of philosophy and cultural criticism.
There appears to be no limit to our interest in the private lives of unhappy artists.
All through the 1920s, eager young emigrants left the towns and farms of America and headed for New York City. One of them recalls the magnetism of the life that pulled him there.
And still they come.
Offices are not what they used to be. On a bulletin board in the office where I work, some mischievous soul has posted work rules said to have been written in 1852:
A routine chore for JFK’s official photographer became the most important assignment of his career. Much of his moving pictorial record appears here for the first time.
It was a typical motorcade. Cecil W. Stoughton had been in many like it. A 43-year-old veteran of the Signal Corps, Captain Stoughton had so impressed John F.
For generations, it was the mainspring, the proof, and the reward of a civilized social life. Now, a fond student of the ritual looks back on the golden age of the dinner party and tells you just how you should have behaved.
Forget your conventional picture of America in 1810. In the first half of the 19th century, we were not at all the placid, straitlaced, white-picket-fence nation we imagine ourselves to have been. By looking at the patterns of everyday life as recorded by contemporary foreign and native observers of the young republic, and by asking the questions that historians don't think to ask of another time—What were people really like? How did they greet one another in the street? How did they occupy their leisure time? What did they eat?—Jack Larking brings us a portrait of another America, an America that was so different from both our conception of its past life and its present-day reality as to seem a foreign country.
WE LOOKED DIFFERENT
Americans have always admired size. We like big statues, big buildings, big burgers. And when it comes to boxing, it is the heavyweights we follow most avidly, fascinated by their sheer volume and by the terrible damage they can do.
SMU isn’t playing this season; men on the team were accepting money from alumni. That’s bad, of course; but today’s game grew out of even-greater scandal.
In October of 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt, who had recently intervened in a national coal strike and the Russo-Japanese War, turned his formidable attention to another kind of struggle.
Back in Prohibition days, the citizens of a West Virginia town decided to crack down on bootlegging and prostitution. The author remembers it well.
How does one describe a small town? And how does one explain a town when it sets out to catch all its sinners? All I can do is tell you a little of the history of my hometown, Hinton, Summers County, West Virginia, as I remember it.
On July 24, 1832, a 60-year-old businessman in Albany, New York drew up an explosive will. The businessman was named William James, but historians call him William of Albany to distinguish him from the elder of his two famous grandsons.