On the road again

Once more the magazine devotes an issue to exploring the one thing you are certain to find at the end of every journey—a sense of the people who were there before you. This time we seek out the past in:

The Lower East Side

Marvin Gelfand uses the close-packed Manhattan streets that were home to the children of the great turn-of-thecentury Jewish immigration to tell a tremendous story that is at once colorful, funny, intimate, grim, and moving. For generations this battered precinct was a high-pressure machine for the manufacture of Americans, and much of the savor of those days is still to be found there.

Custer country

Andrew Ward walks the high, rolling ground where George Armstrong Custer’s command spent its last dreadful minutes and discovers, as thousands have before him, just what it is about the Last Stand that has such a mysterious power to turn the casual visitor into a lifelong buff.

Plus …

Michael Durham, who covered the civil rights struggles of the early 1960s, returns to the old battlegrounds and finds that the Deep South is making them into historic shrines and drawing visitors from around the world … the nation’s first true public art museum celebrates its one hundred and fiftieth birthday … and, because as Stephen Vincent Benét put it, “Americans are always moving on,” more.