Issue

The great tenor came to America in 1903, and it was love at first sight—a love that survived an earthquake and some trouble with the police about a woman at the zoo

The early years of our republic produced dozens of great leaders. A historian explains how men like Adams and Jefferson were selected for public office, and tells why the machinery that raised them became obsolete.

Today more Americans live in them than in city and country combined. How did we get there?

…And what’s more, the planet’s highly civilized inhabitants live together in perfect harmony. So argued an eminent astronomer named Percival Lowell, and for decades tens of thousands of Americans believed him.

The richly embellished account book of an eighteenth-century sea captain, newly discovered in a Maine attic

The largest Gothic cathedral in the Western Hemisphere has the strangest stained-glass windows in the world

The author of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ never set foot on our shores, but he had a clear and highly personal vision of what we were and what we had been

At one time or another, practically every American artist has brought forth a blossom.

For millions of women, consciousness raising didn’t start in the 1960s. It started when they helped win World War II.

The first major engagement of the U. S. Army in Vietnam was a decisive American victory. Perhaps it would have been better for all of us if it had been a defeat.