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It's back again, and six years of experience has taught me that it’s going to make some readers angry. Others will tell us it’s their favorite feature.
From the commune to the prep school
The 60s ended for me one Parents Day at a New England prep school. On that brilliant October morning 20 years ago, I sat in an oak-paneled classroom, one of a small group of adults holding the nervous gaze of a young history teacher. Sitting next to me was Joan Baez.
A talk with the superb journalist and sports reporter who was the co-author of MASH and wrote Ernest Hemingway’s favorite fight novel
Lincoln's depression as reflected in his poetry
Lincoln’s melancholy is famous. Less well-known is that he not only penned thoughts about suicide, but published them in a newspaper. Scholars have long believed that the only copy in the newspaper’s files was mutilated to hide those thoughts from posterity.
For the brilliant songwriter behind the Beach Boys, the endless summer gave way to a very hard winter. Now, he is back, with a work that wants to be no less than a musical history of the American dream.
September 11, 2001 was my daughter’s first day of kindergarten—a new school a long subway ride up the spine of Manhattan. Rebecca’s inaugural school day consisted of half an hour meeting other children, followed by a four-hour walk home.
Cruising the briefly embattled San Juan islands in the Pacific Northwest
A Spirit Forged In Fire
Some 1020 people perished when the steamer General Slocum exploded in New York's East River.
Newell, West Virginia is the headquarters of Fiesta ware.
“Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than the ones you did do,” Mark Twain once instructed his readers. “So, throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.”
The 50 Biggest Changes in the Last 50 Years
A colonial capital remembered for its women
Thomas Edison's gift to the Christmas season
Art and nature have made modern Scottsdale.
It’s the poetry every American writes every day—a centuries-old epic of abuse, taunt, criminality, love, and bright, mocking beauty.
The best news of the year for word buffs, amateur etymologists, professional linguists, and all who respond to the incredible richness of the American language is that J. E. Lighter has found a home for his Historical Dictionary of American Slang.
This was going to begin with a plea whose tenor, if not its specifics, is all-too-familiar.
Hal Holbrook has lived with him nearly as long as Samuel Clemens did, and he explains why Twain still has the power to delight and to disturb.
Beginning with a lecture in St. Louis in 1867, Mark Twain’s great career as a public speaker spanned about 40 years. But, thanks to his avatar Hal Holbrook, he has gone on amusing and instructing and scolding us for another half-century on stages all over the world.
The Model T Ford made the world we live in. On the 100th anniversary of the company Henry Ford founded, his biographer Douglas Brinkley tells how.
"I will build a motor car for the great multitude,” Henry Ford proclaimed to the public when he announced the machine that would change America and indeed the world.
It’s the most purely American food. And that’s maybe the only thing about it that everyone agrees on.
Some of America’s most impressive historic survivors may be our taverns because they’ve had to do it all on their own, by offering you exactly the same kind of comfort they did your great-grandfather.
An artists’ colony in Woodstock, New York celebrates its hundredth year.
My mom's possible role in the immolation of the Hindenburg
In 1937, I was a nine-year-old living on the fifth floor of a six-story walkup in the Bronx. One warm day, I went to open the kitchen window and I heard a great deal of noise from the street below. When I looked down, I saw a crowd of people staring up at the sky and pointing.
Who knows what would have happened if we kids had seen Jane Russell's boobs in that Boston movie theater?
One of the benefits of having a grandfather who was a former mayor of Boston, John F. (“Honey Fitz”) Fitzgerald, was that he had free passes to interesting events. Just by paying the tax on a baseball ticket, I could get into a Red Sox or a Braves game.
The story of Chicago in the 19th century is the story of the making of America, the historian Donald L. Miller explains. A new PBS documentary based on a book he wrote shows why.
The challenges of engaging visitors to historical theme parks
A streetcar fan’s photo album is a window opening on the vanished workaday beauty of downtown.
WHY SINATRA IS OUR GREATEST SINGER, PERIOD
AT ZITO’S BAKERY ON BLEECKER STREET, a Greenwich Village institution, there are two framed photographs on the wall behind the counter. One is a picture of the Pope. The other is a picture of Frank Sinatra smiling broadly and holding a loaf of Zito’s bread.