Why Not Arkansas?

May 2025

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April/May 1986

14 years ago By admin

Volume

37

Issue

3

First it was NBC’s Today show, then U.S. News & World Report , and now, it’s you. Big deal! Texas is one hundred and fifty years old!

The grand state of Arkansas will be one hundred and fifty years old, too, and I have heard zilch from any news media about it. It’s always Texas, Texas, Texas. Look, they’ve got two television shows on CBS ( Dallas and Knots Landing ), so let those publicize Texas. But I do hope that come June 15,1986, American Heritage will run at least two articles on Arkansas and her 150th birthday, or you’ll be out one subscription.

You might keep in mind, also, that it’s Arkansas where the next big boom in film making is going to be. Did you see The Blue and the Grey ?

Stories published from "April/May 1986"

I Love Washington

Authored by: David McCullough

A noted historian’s very personal tour of the city where so much of the American past took shape, with excursions into institutions famous and obscure, the archives that are the nation’s memory, and the haunts of some noble ghosts.

Appendicitis at 100

Authored by: Natalie A. Brooks

In a classic medical paper, Dr. Reginald Fitz identified the disease, named it, showed how to diagnose it, and prescribed an operation that would save tens of millions of lives.

The Calumet Tragedy

Authored by: Michael F. Wendland

When copper-country miners went on strike, the owners brought thugs from the slums of New York to northern Michigan. The struggle led to an event that killed a city.

The Man Who Knew Mozart

Authored by: Dick Adler

Lorenzo Da Ponte, New York bookseller and Pennsylvania grocer, was a charming ne’er-do-well in the eyes of his fellow Americans. He happened, also, to have written the words for Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro.

What Winslow Homer Did On His Vacation

Authored by: The Editors

On sojourns away from the studio where he labored in oils, Homer took along his watercolors and produced his freshest and most expressive work

The Great Foreign-Policy Fight

Authored by: Gregg Herken

For 40 years, George Kennan and Paul Nitze, architects of our foreign policy under nine presidents, have squared off over Russia, the atom bomb, arms control, and everything except for their respect and affection for each other.

“I'm Fine, Just Hurting Inside”

Authored by: Neil A. Grauer

Robert Benchley, a woebegone chronicler of his own inadequacies, was the humorist’s humorist, a man beloved by practically everyone but himself.

Ordeal by Touch

Authored by: Lawrence B. Custer

Up until the last century in some parts of the country, a murderer’s guilt could legally be determined by what happened when he or she touched the victim’s corpse.

Why Not Arkansas?

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