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How luck, television, and a saintly lurker on the Internet combined to let the author visit 1953 for half an hour.
Donald Morris, the novelist, newspaperman, and historian who knows everything and publishes a lively weekly newsletter about it out of Houston, reports a triumph. He has just acquired Sky Birds card No.
FRANCE, BRITAIN, AND THE UNITED STATES ALL WANTED TO OWN MARITIME CANADA. IT’S EASY TO SEE WHY.
WE ALL LIVE BY WHAT HAPPENED ON NOVEMBER 18, 1883.
Perhaps nothing so separates the world of today from that of our ancestors before the Industrial Revolution as do standards. Yet most of the time, we don’t even know they are there.
A critic looks at 10 movies that show how Americans work together.
After 20 years of looking for someone who could perform the “middle deal,” Dai Vernon had pretty much decided that this supreme piece of sleight of hand was a fable. Then, one night in a Wichita jail, a prisoner told Vernon he’d seen a man do it…
When we scheduled John Lukacs’s article about Americans in Venice to run in the previous issue, we assumed that it would be the easiest of stories to illustrate: After all, that city has been living on its looks alone for more than two centuries now.
A RESORT SINCE LINCOLN’S DAY, CAPE MAY OFFERS EASY ENTRÉE INTO THAT ERA’S TASTEFUL HOUSES.
ON THE RUGGED COAST NORTH OF BOSTON, FOUR TOWNS SHARE A LONG HISTORY OF MORTAL PERIL AND ENDURING BEAUTY.
Andy Warhol and friends oversaw the death of a centuries-old tradition and the birth of the postmodern.
“It was like a science fiction movie—,” wrote the late curator and art critic Henry Geldzahler, “you Pop artists in different parts of the city, unknown to each other, rising up out of the muck and staggering forward with your paintings in front of you.” Geldzahler’s lines, with their playful lugubriousness, were apt. When the innovators of pop embarked on their mature work, much of which was uncannily similar and all of which explored the same terrain—American consumer culture—almost none knew what any of the others were doing, or even that they existed. Pop arose spontaneously, an authentic movement, an organic response to new realities.
One of the last veterans of a dangerous violent, exhilarating way of life tells of a youth spent on the road.
WALT DISNEY GAVE US DONALD DUCK, BUT ANOTHER MAN GAVE HIM HIS CHARACTER—AND HIS FAMILY
JACKIE COOGAN REACHED THE PINNACLE OF SUCCESS AND STARDOM WHEN HE WAS FIVE. THEN, HE SET THE HOLLYWOOD PATTERN OF PAYING THE PRICE FOR EARLY FAME.
Geoffrey C. Ward, writer of a major new book and 19-hour documentary on the subject, discusses the joys and wonders of our native art form
Geoffrey C. Ward is no stranger to American Heritage, where he served as editor and later as a columnist.
On Lincoln’s birthday in 1976, The New York Times ran a Tiffany & Co.
MORE AND MORE AMERICANS ARE PAYING A LOT OF MONEY TO PUT THEMSELVES IN MORTAL DANGER. WHY? AND WHY NOW?
STOCKBRIDGE MARKS THE HOLIDAYS BY SUMMONING BACK A WORLD THAT NORMAN ROCKWELL CREATED.
A NEW BIOGRAPHY RESCUES A GREAT INNOVATOR FROM THE SHADOW OF CITIZEN KANE.
History is a self-correcting process. Every historian lives amid the culture of his or her own age and to a greater or lesser extent reflects that culture and its interests and assumptions. Every historian also has prejudices, personal interests, and blind spots.
The ten most-scandalous divorces in American history
1735: THRALL V. THRALL
A once-sleepy Southwestern city that has exploded into a metropolis, Austin fights to retain the best of its past.
IT’S ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO TELL OUR NATIONAL STORY ON TELEVISION, EVEN IF YOU’VE GOT 13 HOURS AT YOUR DISPOSAL. THREE PEOPLE WHO DID IT EXPLAIN HOW AND WHY.
DURING THE FALL OF 1997, our production team at WGBH-TV, Boston’s Public Broadcasting System station began developing a television project that would capture the sweep of American history with, we hoped, real rigor and drama.
A city where the desert is everywhere, where sprawl into magnificent desolation is the main industry, whose oldest building is still its most beautiful, whose surrounding mountains are its soul: Lawrence W. Cheek explains why American Heritage’s Great American Place Award for the year 2000 goes to…
I was a writer on the staff of the Hunter College newspaper when Eleanor Roosevelt, completely alone, would stop by looking for someone to talk to.
The Roosevelt townhouse was only three blocks from Hunter College’s main building at Park Avenue at Sixty-eighth Street, and, one day in 1940, Eleanor just walked in off the street. The door she opened was the entrance to Echo, the college magazine.
“The Cold War is over,” said Paul Tsongas, campaigning for the presidency in 1992. “Japan won.”
A look at one of America’s most resilient prejudices
Those fortified with enough caffeine to follow our presidential race, may have noticed the frequent presence of a priest behind George W. Bush.
The game that has sold 200 million sets was born to teach its players about the evils of capitalism.
No country is so obsessed with the idea that monopoly is evil as the United States. The response of other industrializing societies to the development of economic hegemonies has been to regulate them, not to break them up.
And why it has to
Unless you’ve never been online, visited a video-rental store, watched cable TV, or turned on the set in a modern hotel, you know how much technology has changed the landscape of sex in recent decades. Or at least the landscape of pornography.
For centuries, the Newport rich have been commissioning portraits of themselves, and sometimes getting a surprise when they see the results.