Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
Culture
IN THE 1870S, WEALTH FROM THE NORTH TRANSFORMED THOMASVILLE, GEORGIA
Al Jolson sings in a movie, and the audience hears him.
On October 6, 1927, the Warner Brothers movie The Jazz Singer opened in New York City. In most respects, it was a conventional melodrama.
“Overrated & Underrated” is back again for its fifth year, and, like so many five-year-olds, it’s an attractive troublemaker.
It's a city framed by the breathtaking peaks of Mount St. Helens and Mount Hood, only a 30-minute bike ride from the lush farmland of the Willamette Valley, and driven by a powerful sense of community that allows its citizens to hold on to the best of its pioneer past while collaborating on the future. Randy Gragg explains why American Heritage’s Great American Place Award goes to...
ON THE LAST THURSDAY OF EVERY MONTH, ALBERTA STREET in Portland, Oregon, turns into a long buffet of grass-roots creativity.
A taste of the horror to come in Manhattan
Saturday, July 28, 1945, dawned overcast and sultry in New York City. I’d missed my train from Grand Central Station to Bangor, Maine, where I was attending a summer camp for girls.
The old Confederacy got only as far north as Pennsylvania, but its great-grandchildren have captured America’s culture. Joshua Zeitz looks at sports, entertainment, and religion to show how.
About 60 years ago, in July 1942, a 35-year-old coal miner from East Kentucky named Jim Hammittee packed up his belongings and traveled with his wife to Detroit, where he found work in a roller-bearing plant.
Did Americans have it better back in the 40s?
Remember September 11? Or rather, remember how it was supposed to change us all, and for the better? Among all the predictions was one that held that it would lead to “the end of irony,” the sort of earnest prognostication that is bound to seem ironic in retrospect.
James Gordon Bennett was the forefather of the people who are now inventing internet news.
Floating on the Ohio aboard the only barge that plies American waters
Its last impresario tells why it is the most American of all entertainments. (It’s not because of the strippers.)
It came over with the Mayflower and stayed on to be the unchallenged drink of democracy.
In the history of American beer, the modern period begins on the spring day in 1882 when the short-lived American Association of baseball teams opened for business.
Elevating the frontier ethos over the decadent ways of people in the urban east
In April of 1902, Owen Wister’s Western novel The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains was published. It was an immediate hit, selling 50,000 copies within four months and 100,000 within a year. It remained in print for decades.
This is our 16th annual travel issue. When we started, in 1987, we were motivated partly by knowing that no other magazine was doing this: tying an American passion for travel to an equally intense interest in the nation’s history.
George Washington tried to drain it. Harriet Beecher Stowe was inspired by the escaped slaves hiding in it. Loggers worked it for centuries. Yet it remains one of the least-known unspoiled spots in the East.
Hoboken’s history of hard work has an undeniablly gritty charm, and its view of Manhattan is incomparable.
On September 26, 1918, the Meuse-Argonne offensive began. The attack on the German lines in France lasted for 47 days, until the war’s end, and remains the longest battle in American history. During the assault, Gen. John J.
The classic image of Coach Lombardi in fact fails to capture his solicitude.
Early in the second month of 1953, I was summoned from study hall at White Plains High School. A college football coach wanted to see me.
The woman whose great-grandfather introduced pastrami to the New World explores an American institution that is as hard to define as it is easy to recognize.
After years of ups and downs, Old Glory has just made a major comeback.
B
Martin Scorsese has drawn on his own youth and his feelings about the past, and has rebuilt 1860s New York, to make a movie about the fight for American democracy. Here, he tells why it is both so hard and so necessary to get history on film.
I spoke with Martin Scorsese in early September about his forthcoming movie Gangs of New York. The setting was the Park Avenue offices of his Cappa production company, where he was still hard at work, editing and finishing his film.
Forty years ago, Cold War technology and memories of a still-recent World War II combined to make a plastic paradise of great toys which wistful baby boomers can now revisit.
When terrorists first struck New York’s financial district
If you go downtown in Manhattan to the offices of the old J. P. Morgan firm at the corner of Wall and Broad, you’ll see the pocked-marble scars of the first blow that terrorists struck at America’s financial heart, the Wall Street bombing of 1920.
By chance, I was reading Winston Churchill’s biography of the Duke of Marlborough. It is not quite top-drawer Churchill; the prose rolls and swaggers, but it is also marbled with phoniness.
Has the present ever seemed more of a bully than it does just now? Not long after the terrorist attacks, The New York Times ran an essay that pretty much said that there was no way to view them historically.
WE’VE SEEN IT (ALMOST) ALL BEFORE.
For the first time in a generation, student activism is on the rise. Do these new protesters have anything like the zeal, the conviction, and the clout of their famous 1960s predecessors?
Some 30 years since the storied generation of Vietnam-era student activists began to graduate and disperse into the grown-up world, American universities seem to be emerging once again as a theater for protest and political engagement.
From its birth in pagan transactions with the dead to the current marketing push to make it a “seasonal experience,” America’s fastest-growing holiday has a history far older (and far stranger) than does Christmas itself.
It is a place of noble harbors, a convergence of strong rivers and a promontory commanding a wind-raked bay; a shoreline enfolding towns older than the republic and the most modern and formidable naval base on Earth; a spot where a four-hour standoff between two very peculiar ships changed the course of warfare forever—and the breeding ground of crabs that people travel across the country to eat. Fred Schultz explains why the fifth annual American Heritage Great American Place Award goes to ...
Twice wholly destroyed and twice rebuilt, Norfolk is again redefined and is in the midst of an ambitious rehabilitation.
Nearly a century after her debut, her wit, bravado, and sexuality are a bigger presence than ever.
A NOBLE PRIZE-WINNING ECONOMIST AND HISTORIAN SAYS WE’RE IN THE MIDDLE OF ONE OF AMERICA’S MAJOR PERIODS OF REFORM.
Robert Fogel is best known as one of the two authors of Time on the Cross, a pathbreaking 1974 book that applied statistics and numerical analysis to history to make a provocative and important point: American slavery on the eve of the C