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It didn’t last long. But we never got over it.
The player piano came of age in America ninety years ago, and it caused an almighty stir. Within four decades it appeared to be dead. The craze dwindled, and in 1932 not a single player was shipped from the factories.
In Clare Briggs’, cartoons nobody got chased by 20 cops, nobody broke a plank over the boss’s head, and nobody’s eyes popped out on springs. People just acted the way people do, and as a result, the drawings still make us laugh.
In 1904, the Olympics took place for only the third time in the modern era. The place was St. Louis, where a world’s fair was providing all the glamour and glitter and excitement that anyone could ask. The games, on the other hand, were something else.
The most arresting figure in the 1904 Olympic games was a Cuban mailman named Félix Carvajal.
It began with a few people trying to get hamburgers from grill to customer quicker and cheaper. Now. it’s changed the way Americans live. And ,whether you like it or hate it, once you get on the road, you’ll eat it.
When I was ten, my brother was accepted into a college in Kansas. My parents decided to drive him out from New Jersey, using the opportunity to show both of us the countryside as we went. The year was 1963.
Wherever you go in search of history, there’s a good chance that the first thing you reach for will be a road map. And such maps have a history, too.
On Thanksgiving Day in 1895, the Chicago Times-Herald sponsored a 54-mile road race from Jackson Park to Waukegan and on to Lincoln Park. The prize was $5000.
The early critics of television predicted that the new medium would make Americans passively obedient to the powers-that-be. But they badly underestimated us.
Way back when I was a teenager, it was common knowledge that the mass media—newly reinforced by television—were generating mass conformity, mass passivity, and mass “loss of autonomy.” They were even producing a new kind of dismal American, a truly ominous being, grimly referre
A man who has spent his life helping transform old photos from agreeable curiosities into a vital historical tool explains their magical power to bring the past into the present.
My family came late to television, or so it seemed to me and my equally impatient younger brother. The first set I ever saw was in the home of a kindly couple named Bowersox who lived just up Ingleside Avenue from us in Chicago. Mr.
Before television, before color ads in the magazines, even before billboards, advertising, that mainstay of business in America, was already thriving.
You probably haven’t seen it, but it’s out by the tracks of the Chicago & North Western.
DeKalb, Illinois, our nearest city, is the site of Northern Illinois University. Some 25,000 young people, mostly urban, from Chicago and environs, make Northern their home.
He said that his critics didn’t like his work because it was “too noisy,” but he didn’t care what any of them said. George Luks’ determination to paint only what interested him was his greatest strength and his greatest weakness.
Probing westward along the streets of Manhattan, the first light of Sunday, October 29,1933 revealed, stretched out in a doorway on Sixth Avenue, near Fifty-second Street, under the el, a well-dressed elderly man, solidly built and balding, with a little patc
In his 1844 essay called “The Poet,” Ralph Waldo Emerson urged American poets to fashion a distinctive art from the facts of American life.
Had Thomas Morton raised his maypole anywhere but next door to the Pilgrims, history and legend probably would have no record of him, his town, or his “lascivious” revels.
TIME: Summer, 1628.
A newly discovered record of a proud Southern society that few people ever thought existed
In 1920, when Richard Samuel Roberts’ name first appeared in the Columbia, South Carolina city directory—in the “Colored Dept.“—he was listed as a janitor in the post office.
It was born in America, it came of age in America, and, in an era when foreign competition threatens so many of our industries, it still sweetens our balance of trade.
The candy bar as we know it was born in America. So too, many centuries earlier, was chocolate itself. Mexican natives cultivated the cocoa bean for more than 2500 years before Hernán Cortés took it to Spain with him in 1528.
It took half a century for his critics to see his subjects as clearly as he did; but, today, he stands as America’s preeminent portraitist.
John Singer Sargent, in common with Holbein and Van Dyck, was an international painter of portraits who did his major work in England.
My grandfather, Connecticut-bred, was a saver.
On Harvard’s 350th anniversary, a distinguished alumnus salutes his proud and often-thorny alma mater.
This September, Harvard University will observe the 350th anniversary of its founding. It will do so with ceremony only somewhat less resplendent than the celebration of its tercentenary in 1936.
Forget football, basketball, and all the other sports that are artificially regulated by the clock. Only baseball can truly reveal our national character. Only baseball can light our path to the future.
Some of our finest public buildings were designed by a tormented young English architect whom the world has forgotten.
George Hadfield was one of the most distinguished architects ever to practice in this country, yet he is so little known that no book has been written about him and very little has been published in architectural journals.
The vast jumble of objects that once brought solace to an eccentric heiress has become a great museum of the middle class.
When Margaret Woodbury Strong died in her sleep on July 17, 1969, the demise of the 72-year-old widow did not go unnoticed in Rochester, New York. For one thing, Mrs. Strong was one of Rochester’s richest inhabitants.
It’s probably always a mistake to think of decades in clichés: the 90s weren’t especially gay; for most people, the 20s didn’t roar much. And I suppose the 50s were nowhere near so bland as they once appeared to us, looking back from the 60s.
At the first meeting of my first class in business school, our instructor divided the class into groups and gave each group a project.
71 years ago, a designer working frantically to meet a deadline for the Coca-Cola Company produced a form that today is recognized on sight by 90 percent of the people on Earth.
The cries of the thirsty faithful resounded across the land last year when, after refreshing Americans for the better part of a century, the Coca-Cola Company announced it was introducing a new Coke and retiring the old version.
Many Americans, Hemingway among them, thought him a solemn prig. But Emerson’s biographer discovers a man who found strength and music in the language of the streets.
In the wake of the centennial year of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s death in 1882, scholars, critics, and journalists in various parts of the country started to take a fresh look at the man and his works.
Beatrix Farrand’s exactingly beautiful designs changed the American landscape.
When Beatrix Farrand arrived to work on a garden, clients knew they were in the presence of someone extraordinary.
William Auerbach-Levy’s genius as a caricaturist lay in what he chose to leave out.
Great portraits are frequently caricatures. Think of van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Egon Schiele, Picasso, Max Beckmann, or Alice Neel. On the other hand, caricature is not portraiture. Well, not often. One exception, in my opinion, is William Auerbach-Levy.
Robert Benchley, a woebegone chronicler of his own inadequacies, was the humorist’s humorist, a man beloved by practically everyone but himself.
Early in 1939, Robert Charles Benchley—Phillips Exeter Academy, 1908; Harvard, 1912—put on a paper hat and hoisted himself up onto a set of phony telephone wires strung between mock utility poles on a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer sound stage in Hollywood.
Lorenzo Da Ponte, New York bookseller and Pennsylvania grocer, was a charming ne’er-do-well in the eyes of his fellow Americans. He happened, also, to have written the words for Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro.
It was to be a historic moment, the opening of the very first authentic production of an Italian opera in America, in November 1825.
A noted historian’s very personal tour of the city where so much of the American past took shape, with excursions into institutions famous and obscure, the archives that are the nation’s memory, and the haunts of some noble ghosts.
The only one of our presidents who retired to Washington after leaving office was Woodrow Wilson, and for all his celebrated professorial background he certainly did it in style.