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Literature
In a new book, the political journalist and columnist Richard Reeves retraces Alexis de Tocqueville’s remarkable 1831-32 journey through America. Reeves's conclusion: Tocqueville not only deserves his reputation as the greatest observer of our democracy—he is an incomparable guide to what is happening in our country now.
When AMERICAN HERITAGE heard that Richard Reeves had undertaken to follow the route, one hundred and fifty years later, of a classic exploration of America’s people, places, and institutions, we as
A British schoolboy sees the quiet English countryside come alive with excitement toward the end of 1943 when …
Our most popular practitioner of the art speaks of the challenges and rewards of writing
Georg Brandes, Denmark’s leading literary critic, had a low opinion of historical novels.
Ragtime and Reds
Hollywood ordinarily leaves American history well alone. But two of the winter’s big movies turn out to be meditations on early twentieth-century America. Ragtime , drawn from E. L.
He Never Got Hawaii out of His System
On Sunday morning, March 18, 1866, the steamer A jay. sailed into Honolulu Harbor while the bells of six different mission churches called the freshly converted faithful to worship.
AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID McCULLOUGH
AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID McCULLOUGH
An insider’s account of a startling— and still controversial—investigation of the Allied bombing of Germany
To mark the birthdays of our two great Presidents, a new look at the legends that surround their memory …
An admiring re-appraisal of the Cherry Tree Fable and its author, by Garry Wills , together with the
Curious Story of Abraham Lincoln’s Lost Love Letters, by Don E. Fehrenbacher
To Owen Wister, the unlikely inventor of the cowboy legend, the trail rider was a survivor from the Middle Ages – “the last cavalier,” savior of the Anglo-Saxon race
Crisis at Central High
by Elizabeth Huckaby
Louisiana State University Press
Every man is the prisoner of his own experience; and no artistic production can escape the impress of its time.
An exasperated Ralph Waldo Emerson said of his rudest, most rebellious—and most brilliant—protégé. Their turbulent relationship survived what one newspaper called “the grossest violation of literary comity and courtesy that ever passed under our notice.”
One Saturday evening early in March, 1842, a twenty-two-year-old journalist named Walter Whitman came to the reading room of the New-York Society Library on Broadway, a few blocks north of City Hall, to hear a public lecture on “The Poet.” He had just been ap
Americans first learned to read to save their souls, then to govern themselves. Now the need is not so clear.
In 1765 John Adams wrote that “A native of America who cannot read or write is as rare an appearance as a Jacobite or a Roman Catholic, that is, as rare as a comet or an earthquake.” He went on to say that “all candid foreigners who have p
GOOD READING
The Shattered Silents: How the Talkies Came to Stay
by Alexander Walker William Morrow and Co., Inc. 65 photographs, 218 pages, $10.95
A young poet’s memories of the old rural America in whose fields he worked for two sunny months while awaiting the call to service in the First World War
He was the first Englishman to give a detailed description of the North American wilderness. Was it a pack of lies?
“Does the name David Ingram mean anything to you?” I have been going around asking. The answer is almost always no. Yet if Ingram is to be believed, he and two others with him accomplished perhaps the outstanding walk in recorded history.
The Plains Acrossi The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-60
by John D. Unruh, Jr. University of Illinois Press Illustrations, tables, maps 565 pages, $20.00
When Theodore Roosevelt—Harvard-educated, dandified, and just twenty-three—arrived in Albany as an assemblyman in 1882, the oldpols dismissed him as a “Punkin-Lily,”and worse. They were in for a shock.
David McCullough’s
THE PATH BETWEEN THE SEAS
It is very rarely that a book of history has an important impact on current events.
Mark Twain, surely the most American of great American writers, was, like the country itself, a creature of stupendous contradictions—gentle and tender at any given moment, and in the next possessed of rages so intense they cou
Ernest Hemingway and His World
by Anthony Burgess Charles Scribner’s Sons, 144 pages, photographs, $10.95
to Joseph P. Lash for Roosevelt and Churchill, 1939–1941: The Partnership That Saved the West
If Joseph P. Lash had decided, back in 1942, to write a book on the wartime friendship between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, he would have been off to a lucky start.
The Man Who Invented Himself
Jack London carved himself a special niche in the annals of American literature.
The Cold War—we have spent a generation hearing about it, thinking about it, worrying about it.
“The world is my country, to hate rascals is my religion” he once said, and for more than forty years—before he mysteriously vanished—he blasted away at the delusions, pretentions, posturings, hopes, dreams, foibles, and institutions of all mankind. His name was Ambrose Bierce …
If Ambrose Bierce, America’s first exponent of black humor, crudest epigrammist, and most terrifying teller of horror tales, is now finally coming into his own, it is because thinking Americans are finally recognizing the relevance of his vision—that America
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