Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
Culture
The idealists who founded this utopian colony were singularly well-versed in mystical philosophy and singularly ignorant about farming.
On the first day of June 1843, Bronson Alcott drove a large wagon up to his house in Concord, Massachusetts. Onto it, he loaded his wife, Abby, three of his four little girls, his books, and enough belongings to sustain them in a new home.
The Lone Star state as it once was, proud, isolated, independent, the undiluted essence of America forever inventing itself out of the hardscrabble reality of the frontier
The Texans on these pages are a vanishing species, born of the vast and varied geography of the toughest frontier.
Biographies of writers often disappoint. Albert Camus once described life in the literary arena with bleak accuracy: “One imagines black intrigues, vast ambitious schemings. There are nothing but vanities, satisfied with small rewards.”
50 years ago, these rough-and-ready tin soldiers were sold from bins cheap and by the handful. Today, collectors are seeking them for their bright, simple vitality.
Commercially made metal toy soldiers date back to the late 18th century, when German tinsmiths began casting two-dimensional or “flat” figures of the sort immortalized by Hans Christian Andersen in “The Steadfast Tin Soldier.” European firms went on to develo
This is not a test. It’s the real thing.
How precise is the educated American’s understanding of the history of our country? I don’t mean exact knowledge of minor dates, or small details about the terms of laws, or questions like “Who was secretary of war in 1851?” ( Answer: Charles M.
New Orleans cuisine, with its French roux, African okra, Indian filé, and Spanish peppers, is literally a gastronomic melting pot. Here’s how it all came together.
Across most of America nowadays the term Creole when applied to food variably conjures up images of charred, blackened fish and meat, overbearing, fiery seasonings, and a ubiquitous red sauce not unlike the kind you buy in a ca
At a time when our civilization is trying to organize itself on scientific principles of mathematical probabilities, statistical modeling, and the like, is traditional narrative history of any real use? Yes, says a distinguished practitioner of the discipline; it can always help us. It might even save us.
I was recently sent a well-argued report written by sensible people which insisted that a larger place must be found in our schools and colleges for instruction in mathematics and “quantitative thinking.” Scarcely had I finished reading it when a full professor came by to tell
John White Alexander began his career as an office boy at Harper’s Weekly and rose to be a leading painter of his generation, especially of its women.
In the early 1900s, John White Alexander was considered one of the four preeminent American painters of his day, the peer of Whistler, Sargent, and E. A. Abbey.
He recreated with perfect pitch every tone of voice, every creak and rattle of an America that was disintegrating, even as it gave birth to the country we inhabit today.
My first—and last—sight of Sinclair Lewis was in Union Square.
Being a millionaire no longer counts for much if you’re consumed by the desire to be rich, and it counts for even less if you’re consumed by the desire to be famous.
On the eve of the Civil War, a Mississippi plantation owner and Philadelphia architect set out to build a massive octagonal mansion in Natchez.
The men and women who labored in the ghostly light of the great screen to make the music that accompanied silent movies were as much a part of the show as Lillian Gish or Douglas Fairbanks.
If I ever kill anyone,” D. W. Griffith once exclaimed, “it won’t be an actor, but a musician.” He had been arguing with Joseph Carl Breil, his collaborator on the score for The Birth of a Nation.
It might seem that building a mausoleum to the great general would be a serenely melancholy task. Not at all. The bitter squabbles that surrounded the memorial set city against country and became a mirror of the forces that were straining turn-of-the-century America.
When Groucho Marx asked, “Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?” on “You Bet Your Life,” he was offering unsuccessful competitors, battered by his heckling and bewildered by the game, a chance for redemption and some easy money.
Much has changed in Utah since World War II, but, outside of the metropolitan center in the Salt Lake Valley, the addiction to rural simplicity and the idea of home is still strong.
A lot of people still remember how great it was to ride in the old Pullmans, how curiously regal to have a simple, well-cooked meal in the dining car. Those memories are perfectly accurate, and that lost pleasure holds a lesson for us that extends beyond mere nostalgia.
Not long ago, I received a very angry letter from an old friend. It was a response to my suggestion that liberal arts colleges might give students some instruction in technology; that is, give them some feeling for how the world they are living in works.
His works ranged from intimate cameos to heroic public monuments. America has produced no greater sculptor.
For the “mysterious aura” of his art, a critic has compared him to Thomas Eakins. In the “haunting grandeur” of his sculpture, he is the equal of Auguste Rodin.
Have historians underestimated the importance of Roosevelt’s 24-year struggle with the disease that made him a paraplegic?
The afternoon of August 26, 1933 was warm and sunny in Poughkeepsie, and a large crowd had gathered on the Vassar College campus for a Dutchess County reception in honor of the area’s most illustrious citizen, Franklin Roosevelt.
While a whole generation of artists sought inspiration in the wilderness, George Inness was painting the fields and farms of a man-made countryside.
Two years younger than Jasper Cropsey and Sanford Gifford and one year older than Frederic Edwin Church, George Inness was the contemporary of a group of American landscape painters closely joined by shared styles and ideals in the tradition of Thomas Cole.
A letter written by Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1818 is my second-favorite business letter. Vanderbilt was then 24, and he wrote to his employer, Thomas Gibbons, the owner of a ferry that ran between New Brunswick and New York City, about a competitor named Letson.
It was a hundred years ago, and the game has changed a good deal since then. But there are plenty of people who still insist that cranky old Hoss Radbourn was the finest pitcher ever.
Greatest season performance by Major League pitcher? One hundred years ago last summer, Charles Radbourn won 60 and lost 12 for the Providence Grays of the National League.
A young artist takes on a venerable genre.
Few aesthetic disciplines are as exacting as marine art. Consider the problems. The painter of portraits or landscapes can return to the subject again and again to verify shape, color, tone. But water is a moving, constantly changing element.
He built a career and a fortune out of shocking his fellow Americans.
Whatever town he was lecturing in—Chicago or Cheyenne, New York or Denver—Robert Green Ingersoll packed the house. When the seats were full, people would stand in the aisles, on the stage, in the wings.
A memoir of Boy Scouting in the youthful days of the movement
The Boy Scouts of America, I am surprised to discover, is 75 this year, a wintry age for something so perpetually associated with the springtime of life.
Israel Sack made a fortune by seeing early on the craft in fine old American furniture.
To a casual passerby on East Fifty-seventh Street in Midtown Manhattan, No. 15 looks like any other small, wellkept building. On the main floor is an antique-silver shop.
Not long after the turn of this century, an enterprising man named Bender bought at auction some one hundred thousand glass negatives of Civil War scenes.
The years that the famous writer spent in their town were magic to a young boy and his sister.
A year after our arrival in Redding, Connecticut, Mark Twain came there to live.
They were called “friendly visitors” and they indeed visited, but could they really be considered friendly?
The attitude of today’s social workers toward welfare clients is sometimes criticized as callous or patronizing, but compared with their turn-of-the-century counterparts, our current case-workers are paragons of tact.
A hankering for house cars, trailers, and motor homes has diverted Americans for more than 70 years.
“See America First.” After the First World War broke out in Europe, this slogan, coined by an organization of Western businessmen and civic leaders, beckoned thousands of Americans to see the West.
A distinguished journalist and former presidential adviser says that, to find the meaning of any news story, we must dig for its roots in the past.
I am fascinated by what I see in the rearview mirror of experience. The future, being a mystery, excites, but the past instructs.
He was the most naturally gifted of The Eight, and his vigorous, uninhibited vision of city life transformed American painting at the turn of the century. In fact, he may have been too gifted.
Never at an art exhibition in this city has there been such an attendance,” the young painter Guy Pène du Bois reported in the New York American for February 4, 1908, adding that “only with the greatest difficulty, by