Issue


Featured Articles

Letters of a Most Uncommon Common Man

Author: David McCullough

Harry Truman’s lifetime correspondence with his adored Bess opens a window on their time

Paintings From a Picture Palace

Author: Judith Katten

George Eastman didn’t think the posters the movie companies supplied were good enough for his theater. So he commissioned a local artist to paint better ones.

The Day Before Hollywood

Author: Kevin Brownlow

It was a suburb of orange blossoms and gardens, of gracious homes and quiet, dignified lives—until a regrettable class of people moved in.

The Warner Mob

Author: Edward Sorel

With the Depression pushing the studio toward bankruptcy, Warner Brothers had to resort to crime—and crime paid so well that the company was able to recruit the toughest guys that ever shot up a sound stage.

Facing Zanuck

Author: Joseph Schrank

It was a great life being a contract writer for a major studio during the high noon of the American movie industry—but it could also be a nightmare. A survivor recalls the pleasures and ardors of working at 20th Century-Fox forty years ago.

Master James Is Home For Christmas!

Author: John Springer

Some of the best moments in hundreds of movies took place at Christmastime. And the author may have seen every one of them.

John F. Kennedy, Twenty Years Later

Author: William E. Leuchtenburg

Was the murdered President one of our best, a man of “vigor, rationality, and noble vision” or was he “an optical illusion,” “an expensively programmed waxwork”? A noted historian examines the mottled evolution of his reputation.

The Ship That Died Of Carelessness

Author: Harvey Ardman

The Normandie has been gone since World War II, but many people still remember her as the most beautiful passenger liner ever built. It is the saddest of ironies that she fled her native France to seek safety in New York Harbor.

What Went Wrong With Disney’s Worlds Fair

Author: Elting E. Morison

With Epcot, Walt Disney turned his formidable skills to building a city where man and technology could live together in perfect harmony. The result is part prophecy, part world’s fair. Here, America’s leading authority on technological history examines this urban experiment in the light of past world’s fairs, and tells why it fails where they succeeded—and why that matters.

Day By Day in a Colonial Town

Author: Robert N. Linscott

How Hadley, Massachusetts, (incorporated 1661) coped with wolves, drunks, Indians, witches, and the laws of God and man.