Issue

On a government surveying party in the Pacific Northwest eighty-five years ago, nothing was more valuable than a sense of humor. Topographer Alfred Downing had one that happily showed in his sketches

Or, How to Write a Smash Hit the First Time You Try

"My God, it talks!” said the Emperor of Brazil. So the new invention did—but not until Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant had solved some brain racking problems

To become a successful local hero, get a good biographer and outlive your detractors

The furnaces were cooled, and Carnegie’s great steel plant stood empty—but dawn would bring one of the bloodiest labor-management struggles in U.S. history

Had there been a Warren Commission exactly a century ago, when Abraham Lincoln was shot, its report might have read like the somber, moving, and impressively researched book from which the following narrative is taken.