Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
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How a young New York society matron named Alice Shaw dazzled English royalty with her extraordinary embouchure
Whistling women and crowing hens Always come to some bad ends. —American folk-saying
AMERICAN CHARACTERS
Lincoln Steffens was a young reporter for the Commercial Advertiser during the late 1890’s, and he always remembered it as a grand time for a New York City newspaperman: “There was the Cuban war, the Boer war, and best of all—T
The sad story of a magazine born eighty years too soon
Some time ago a man lit on a publishing idea that seemed obvious enough but apparently had never been tried before: since people are most interested in the doings of famous people, why not devote a magazine to just that?
He loved women so much he painted wings on them. After years of neglect, he is now being appreciated.
VISITORS TO a performance by the Kneisel String Quartet in New York City one autumn afternoon in 1894 may well have been distracted from the sonorities of Beethoven by a strangely dressed man in the audience.
It sits like an exclamation point at the easternmost tip of Long Island and has done so for 184 years—making the Montauk Point Lighthouse one of the oldest in the United States. It also has the distinction of having been authorized by President George Washington himself.
A photographic portrait of Lake Placid, New York, in the pre-Olympic Age
The Algonquin Indians, legend has it, called the natives who inhabited the mountains of upstate New York ” Adirondacks,” or “Those Who Eat Bark.” And so the mountains got their name—although by the end of the nineteenth century not many of those who came to t
For years passengers travelling the railroad between New York City and Albany were stirred from their reveries by a Scottish castle looming suddenly from the Hudson River. An outpost of nearby West Point?
On the fifth of January, 1818, a skeptical crowd peered through a blizzard to where the packet James Monroe lay at anchor in New York Harbor.
They don’t look like much.
“The most helpful thing I can think of,” Louis Tiffany once wrote, “is to show people that beauty is everywhere…up-lifting…healthgiving.” He showed that beauty most memorably in the opulent, iridescent, glass that made a Tiffany vase or lamp the hallmark of a
Her life preservers weighted with scrap-iron, her lifeboats mere decoration, the excursion steamer General Slocum left New York’s Third Street pier at 9:30 on the morning of June 15,1904, with thirteen-hundred picknickers bound for a Long Island beach. Less than an hour later, she was afire.
June in Middle Village—a time of flowers. Along block after block in that quiet section of Queens in New York, front yards glow with their colors. Roses by the thousands, the tens of thousands.
During the spring of 1825 a handful of prisoners were landed on the shore of the Hudson River at Mt. Pleasant to begin construction of a new penitentiary. For six months they toiled under the wary eyes and ready muskets of their keepers, sleeping in tents and lean-tos.
A ponderous memorial to a people who refused to vanish
A young girl’s memories of life in a community haunted by
The mothers of my childhood friends paid special attention to me, and I never understood why.
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.
An exclusive preserve of New York’s social elite —its rise, its flourishing years, and its slide into genteel decline
In a gazetteer of the geography of high society, Tuxedo Park, New York, might properly be described as a village (pop. 972), 40 miles NW of the Union Club in New York City, once famous for its rarefied social climate.
The ups and downs of the invention that forever altered the American skyline
Of the mechanical wonders placed on view in the Crystal Palace, the great iron-and-glass exhibition hall erected in New York City in 1853 to house America’s first world’s fair, one of the most popular was a towering machine that was destined to transform the
In 1693 the people of New York had more to worry about than a fiscal crisis, as the newly revealed documents on these pages attest.
Paul Robeson was giving a concert. It ended in a riot that foreshadowed the McCarthy era of the 1950’s
In most ways and in most places, Labor Day weekend in 1949 was the quiet, lazy end-of-summer occasion that Americans long have cherished.
Besides being a bigot, a fop, and a thief, the British governor Lord Cornbury, had some peculiar fetishes
Despite their many differences, Queen Anne’s North American colonies all shared a decent respect for propriety—or at least the appearance thereof.
A gathering of turn-of-the-century paintings
Our cities began as muddy accidents.
No other impresario ever matched the record of the indomitable Max Maretzek in bringing new works and new stars to America
He was called “the indomitable Max,” “the indefatigable Max,” “the hardy pioneer,” “the Napoleon of Opera.” About that Napoleonic designation Max Maretzek himself disagreed.
Would the great fighter come over for the Union? Italian freedom and lead troops Lincoln hoped so
In the summer of 1861, when the newspaper generals in New York clamored for a clash of arms to put down the Confederate rebellion, the battle and the recriminations came sooner than expected.
As Lincoln lay dying from an assassin’s bullet across the street from Ford’s Theatre through the grim night of April 14, 1865, frequent bulletins on his sinking condition clicked between the major American cities along the country’s spreading web of Morse tel
The fastest man in the air competed with the Wrights for ten years, became rich, and awakened America to the air age.
America has long been celebrated as a nation of inventive tinkerers.
The happy meeting of a young matron and an extraordinary camera produced a memorable record of turn-of-the-century America
The little group of figures below, who have composed themselves with such artless grace on a sun-dappled lawn beside a lake, were photographed in the first decade of this century by an ingenious camera called the Number 4 Panoram Kodak.
Today the place is one great migraine headache of noise and neon, and it takes a very observant visitor indeed to pick out the few pathetic remnants of the old glory: a scrap of decorative wrought iron on top of a building, a carved wooden allegory in the cla
Outside, winter rains pelted the hard earth and frozen waters where the Hudson and Mohawk rivers meet. Inside the magnificent manor house a sick old man sat with his son. The son noticed the old man’s stillness and tried his pulse.
Was there really a conspiracy to burn the town?
In January, 1708, a Mr. William Hallett, Jr., of Newton, Long Island, was murdered in his sleep with his pregnant wife and his five children. Two of Hallett’s slaves, an Indian man and a Negro woman, were tried for the crime and found guilty.
Carl Fisher thought Americans should be able to drive across their country, but it took a decade and a world war to finish his road
When Carl Graham Fisher, best known as the builder and promoter of Miami Beach who started the Florida vacation craze, died in 1939 the New York Times pointed out that he brought about a far more significant change in the life-style of modern America in his earlier and less conspicuous role as the creator of the idea of the Lincoln Highway, the first automobile road from New York to California.
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