We were what we wore

Clothes have always been about more than staying warm and dry, and their progress in the New World has been as dramatic and unpredictable as the history of the United States itself. Beginning with Puritan efforts to ban fancy dress, ending with the string bikini, and in between showing the impact that mass production of garments had on the whole society, Ink Mendelsohn traces the career of clothing in America —and finds herself examining the fabric of our civilization. The story is accompanied by a portfolio of photographs in which Anne Hollander looks at what American men from Buffalo Bill to Marion Brando were wearing, and tells what they meant by it.

How the U.S. helped industrialize Russia

The first generation of Russian Revolutionaries may have hated capitalist America, but they certainly loved industrial America. To Lenin, Henry Ford was nearly as much of a hero as Karl Marx, and as soon as he could, the Soviet leader brought over a cadre of American engineers and managers who taught a nation of farmers to build bridges, dams, generators, electrical grids, and tractor factories. The historian of technology Thomas Hughes shows how, in twenty short years, Yankee advisers and corporations gave Russia an industrial base.

The children of Gettysburg

The Civil War’s costliest battle was I fought in 1863 across a famous grouping of hills and ridges, but it was also fought through a Pennsylvania town full of frightened, fascinated children. Elizabeth Daniels found out what these youngsters had to say about it, and in a moving narrative she shows how the storm that burst over their homes and left dead men on their front porches and wounded ones in their barns haunted their lives forever.

Plus…

Oliver Jensen visits the majestic toytrain collection of the man who, as head of Amtrak, also gets to play with the real thing… our fourth annual winter art show … and, not to be outdone by Old Saint Nick, more.