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The job ran in the family; both his uncle and grandfather were Secretaries of State. Home life in a parsonage taught him piety, and the law precision. The rigid views of a world divided between good and evil he worked out, apparently, himself. Private letters and new taped recollections help explain the shaping of the man who set our Cold War foreign policy

An artist recalls his Midwestern home town and the poet who made it famous

Patent medicines were usually neither patented nor medicinal, which is not to say they didn’t (and don’t) have any effect

The longtime adviser to American Heritage wrote history not simply as a means of talking with other historians, but in order to talk to the general reader.

Twenty years after the Little Bighorn— what happened to a fighting people

If it rained, the painters failed to record it

Introduced not quite a century ago under a name born for oblivion, the game of tennis promises to last forever

A domino theory, distant wilderness warfare, the notion of “defensive enclaves,” hawks, doves, hired mercenaries, possible intervention by hostile powers, a Little trouble telling friendly natives from unfriendly—George III went through the whole routine

Operation Market-Garden promised to lay an airborne red carpet to victory, but its final objective proved to be “a bridge to far.”

The Big Ditch had so far been a colossal flop, and Teddy Roosevelt desperately needed an engineering genius who could take over the job and “make the dirt fly.” The answer was not the famous Goethals, but a man whom history has forgotten.