<p><span class="deck"><span class="typestyle">After standing in New York Harbor for nearly one hundred years, this thin-skinned but sturdy lady needs a lot of attention. She’s getting it -- from a crack team of French and American architects and engineers.</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck">He was the most naturally gifted of The Eight, and his vigorous, uninhibited vision of city life transformed American painting at the turn of the century. In fact, he may have been too gifted.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Have historians underestimated the importance of Roosevelt’s 24-year struggle with the disease that made him a paraplegic?</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">The Civil War ignited the basic conflict between a free press and the need for military security. By war’s end, the hard-won compromises between soldiers and journalists may not have provided all the answers, but they had raised all the modern questions.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">It might seem that building a mausoleum to the great general would be a serenely melancholy task. Not at all. The bitter squabbles that surrounded the memorial set city against country and became a mirror of the forces that were straining turn-of-the-century America.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">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 <span class="typestyle"> Don Giovanni</span> and <em><span class="typestyle"> The Marriage of Figaro</span></em>. </span></p>
<p><span class="deck">The vast jumble of objects that once brought solace to an eccentric heiress has become a great museum of the middle class.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Despite his feeling that “we are beginning to lose the memory of what a restrained and civil society can be like,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the senior senator from New York, and a lifelong student of history, remains an optimist about our system of government and our resilience as a people.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> Since 1930, more than half of America’s splendid elm trees have succumbed to disease. But science is now fighting back and gaining ground. </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> With its roots in the medically benighted eighteenth century, and its history shaped by the needs of the urban poor, Bellevue has emerged on its 250th anniversary as a world-renowned center of modern medicine</span> </p>
<p><span class="deck"> From Fort Ticonderoga to the Plaza Hotel, from Appomattox Courthouse to Bugsy Siegel’s weird rose garden in Las Vegas, the present-day scene is enriched by knowledge of the American past</span> </p>
<p><span class="deck"> A biographer who knows it well tours Franklin Roosevelt’s home on the Hudson and finds it was not so much the President’s castle as it was his formidable mother’s.</span> </p>
<p><span class="deck"> A knowledgeable and passionate guide takes us for a walk down Wall Street, and we find the buildings there eloquent of the whole history of American finance</span> </p>
<p><span class="deck">He said that his critics didn’t like his work because it was “too noisy,” but he didn’t care what any of them said. George Luks’ determination to paint only what interested him was his greatest strength and his greatest weakness.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">George Templeton Strong was not a public man, and he is not widely known today. But, for 40 years, he kept the best diary, in both historic and literary terms, ever written by an American.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">All through the 1920s, eager young emigrants left the towns and farms of America and headed for New York City. One of them recalls the magnetism of the life that pulled him there.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">New Yorkers recall 1939 as the year of the great World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow. But that’s just more Eastern provincialism. Take a look at what was going on in San Francisco.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">In the years between the dedication of the Statue of Liberty and the First World War, the Divine Sarah was, for hundreds of thousands of Americans, the single most compelling embodiment of the French republic.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">It cannot be measured in dollars alone. It involved a kind of personal power that no man of affairs will ever have again.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">The urge to move documents as fast as possible has always been a national preoccupation because it has always been a necessity. Faxes and Federal Express are just the latest among many innovations for getting the message across.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">A restaurant critic who’s a food historian and the fortunate recipient of an Italian grandmother’s cooking follows the course of America’s favorite ethnic fare in its rise from spaghetti and a red-checked tablecloth to carpaccio and fine bone china.</span></p>
<p>He excelled at business and made Macy's highly profitable. But Nathan Straus was even better at giving away his earnings to help people in need.</p>
<p><span class="deck">Fewer than half of O. Henry’s short stories actually take place in New York, but we still see the city through his eyes.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">In the most self-consuming of cities, an impressive and little-known architectural legacy remains to show us how New Yorkers have lived and prospered since the days when the population stood at around 1000.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">The fiercest struggle going on in education is about who owns the past. Passionate multi-culturalists say that traditional history- teaching has brushed out minority ethnic identities. Their opponents say that radical multi-culturalism leads toward national fragmentation.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">A walk through the old Jewish Lower East Side of New York City recalls the era when that battered, close-packed quarter was a high-pressure machine for the manufacture of Americans.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">75 years ago this spring, a very different America waded into the seminal catastrophe of the 20th century. World War I did more than kill millions of people; it destroyed the West’s faith in the very institutions that had made it the hope and envy of the world.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">The great Czech composer arrived on these shores a century ago and wrote some of his most enduring masterpieces here. Perhaps more important, he understood better than any American of the day where our musical destiny lay.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Americans invented the grand hotel in the 1830s, and, during the next century, brought it to a zenith of democratic luxury that makes a visit to the surviving examples the most agreeable of historic pilgrimages.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">The Johnsons and the Kennedys are popularly thought to have shared a strong mutual dislike, but stacks of letters and a remarkable tape of Jacqueline Kennedy reminiscing show something very different and more interesting.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">The American newspaper: beleaguered by television, hated both for its timidity and its arrogance, biased, provincial, overweening, and still indispensable. A Hearst veteran tells how it got to where it is today, and where it may be headed.</span></p>
