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Out of an agonizing American experience, the frail Scottish author mined a treasure and carried it away with him.

   

Fashion once expressed America’s class distinctions. But it doesn’t any more.

A Chicago judge ruled in 1908 that a nightgown was a luxury, not a necessity, and thereupon issued a restraining order forbidding an 18-year-old girl from buying one against her father’s wishes.
Animation has come to historical documentaries. Perhaps inspired by the success of animated fictional films such as Waking Life (2001), nonfiction filmmakers are choosing to illustrate the past rather than rely on archival images or reenacted scenes.
Forty years ago, a few rich kids hatched a nutty idea that became an event that rocked the nation, then morphed into a movement whose legacy lives on.
 Matters of Debate
 Abraham Lincoln is the most written-about person in American history, and the third-most in world history—ranking below only Jesus and Napoleon. The deluge of books about the Great Emancipator has only increased with the bicentennial of his birth this year.
 “I endeavored to shriek–, and my lips and my parched tongue moved convulsively together in the attempt–but no voice issued from the cavernous lungs which,  oppressed as if by the weight of some incumbent mountain, gasped and palpitated, with the heart, at ev
 On the grounds of the Ewa Plantation School just west of Honolulu stands a bronze statue of a young Abraham Lincoln with ax in hand, forearms rippling after splitting logs.

Notable American History Books of 2008

 Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys, the Castros, and the Politics of Murder  By Gus Russo and Stephen Molton
It happens that three of the most critical and momentous occasions in our nation’s history converge in this issue.
For the counter-culture crowd of the late 1960s and early 1970s, reading Hunter S. Thompson was de rigueur.
EMI Classics has just released Paul Robeson: The Complete EMI Sessions 1928-1939, a seven-CD set featuring 170 digitally remastered tracks that include American plantation songs and spirituals, British folk songs, art songs, and popular hits of the day, such as “Ol’ Man River” from S

Twenty-five years after Grace Kelly’s tragic death, Howell Conant’s photographs of her still resonate with the “natural glamour” that changed Hollywood.

It was an extraordinary friendship between photographer and subject. Over a period spanning 27 years, from the early years of her Hollywood fame to her tragic car accident in 1982, Howell Conant captured Grace Kelly as she blossomed from a movie legend into a princess and then mother and royal role model. In the process, Conant broke through the cold, goddess-style portrait style that was the vogue and created a new look in Hollywood portraits: natural glamour. Yet, throughout, Conant acted not just as her official photographer but also her confidant, who had access to Grace in her most private moments.

Twenty-five years after Grace Kelly’s tragic death, Howell Conant’s photographs of her still resonate with the “natural glamour” that changed Hollywood.

It was an extraordinary friendship between photographer and subject. Over a period spanning 27 years, from the early years of her Hollywood fame to her tragic car accident in 1982, Howell Conant captured Grace Kelly as she blossomed from a movie legend into a princess and then mother and royal role model. In the process, Conant broke through the cold, goddess-style portrait style that was the vogue and created a new look in Hollywood portraits: natural glamour. Yet, throughout, Conant acted not just as her official photographer but also her confidant, who had access to Grace in her most private moments.

The late David Halberstam was a journalist, heart and soul, with a distinctive way of writing history.

DAVID HALBERSTAM had put the finishing touches on his final book, The Coldest Winter, in the spring of 2007, just five days before his tragic death in a car accident in California.
 In the shadow of Independence Hall and a half block from the Liberty Bell, on some of this nation’s most hallowed ground, sits the brand new glass-and-terra-cotta National Museum of American Jewish History, which opened this November.
 First Family: Abigail and John Adams By Joseph J. Ellis  
 First Family: Abigail and John Adams By Joseph J. Ellis  

The lovable gang of kids and a beagle came from the imagination of a man who adored children.

On October 2, 1950, my father signed with United Feature Syndicate, believing that his job was to help editors sell newspapers. He started in seven papers. Fifty years later, with the strip appearing in a record 2600 newspapers, Dad still went to work motivated by that same belief.

The lovable gang of kids and a beagle came from the imagination of a man who adored children.

On October 2, 1950, my father signed with United Feature Syndicate, believing that his job was to help editors sell newspapers. He started in seven papers. Fifty years later, with the strip appearing in a record 2600 newspapers, Dad still went to work motivated by that same belief.

A Holiday Gift Special

The Gun By C. J. Chivers

Most associate Ronald Reagan with California, but he spent his formative years in the midwest. On the centennial of his birth, a handful of small Illinois towns want a share of the limelight.

Back in 1965, Ronald Reagan published his first memoir, Where’s the Rest of Me?, borrowing the title from a line in the 1942 Warner Brothers film Kings Row.

Renovations have been completed in time for the Lincoln bicentennial.

The day after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, while the actor-turned-murderer John Wilkes Booth fled into the Maryland countryside and the nation recoiled in outrage and shock, Secretary of War Edwin M.
Washington’s newest attraction proves that progress can come to the capital city.

The old man smoking a cigar looked like Winston Churchill.

In the 1950s and ’60s I had the good fortune to live in New York City, right across from Riverside Park. Our 325-acre back yard offered sledding in winter, and for the rest of the year I could race my Schwinn throughout the park.

A New Jersey seaside resort struggles to save the architecture and the memories of the Eisenhower years.

     
Working on this, our 21st annual travel issue, reminded me that I am fortunate enough to have a most agreeable travel destination virtually under my feet. This is the Forbes Galleries in the company’s headquarters at 62 Fifth Avenue in New York City. I first visited them 20 years ago.

You can go there, too, even to the Bates Motel.

Was Hal Blaine one of your favorite musicians back in the 1960s? How about Larry Knechtel? Carol Kaye? Oh, yes, they were.

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