Issue

You probably haven’t seen it, but it’s out by the tracks of the Chicago & North Western.

A man who has spent his life helping transform old photos from agreeable curiosities into a vital historical tool explains their magical power to bring the past into the present.

Every one of the founders was a historian who believed that only history could protect us from tyranny and coercion. In their reactions to the long, bloody pageant of the English past, we can see the framers’ intentions.

It was discovered in New Jersey in 1858, was made into full-size copies that were sent as far away as Edinburgh, and had a violent run-in with Boss Tweed in 1871. Now, after 50 years out of view, the ugly brute can be seen in Philadelphia.

Only one man had the wit, audacity, and self-confidence to make the case.

The early critics of television predicted that the new medium would make Americans passively obedient to the powers-that-be. But they badly underestimated us.

On their weathered stone battlements can be read the whole history of the three-century struggle for supremacy in the New World.

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.