Arms and the press …

To Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, journalists were a “set of dirty … scribblers who have the impudence of Satan.” A hundred and twenty years later, during the invasion of Grenada, the U.S. military felt it had found the solution to newspaper meddling: it simply left the press behind. But the public outcry that followed raised all the old issues, and we examine them. Stephen W. Sears traces the growing enmity between newsmen and the military during the Civil War; Joseph H. Cooper unearths a historical alternative to the present vogue of generals suing the press; and the veteran reporter John Chancellor, looking back to World War II, speculates on why the military trusted correspondents so much more at a time when the stakes were really high.

The greatest American sculptor…

Augustus Saint-Gaudens created scores of monuments that remain as mysteriously moving today as when they were unveiled. In an article that coincides with a major new exhibition of his work at the Metropolitan Museum, we trace the artist’s hectic career from his apprenticeship as a cameo carver to the completion of his majestic Shaw memorial, the most impressive work of art to come out of our Civil War.

Broken connection …

America may have forgotten how to run a railroad, and our auto industry may have been eroded by an Asian tide—but we still had a century-old telephone system that was the envy of the world. Then we tore it apart. In an absorbing obituary to the dismembered giant, Peter Baida traces the history of AT&T from Alexander Graham Bell’s first call to last year’s divestiture.

Going in harm’s way …

At the outset of World War II, the U.S. Naval High Command hoped to fight German U-boats with a fleet of hastily converted trawlers and cabin cruisers. Lt. Russell E. Sard’s command was an ancient Gloucester fishing schooner, and in a memoir both uproarious and melancholy, he recalls his warship’s first and last voyage.

Plus…

the saga of the great French naturalist who attacked a bat with Audubon’s violin … the last thirty years of American law as seen by a man who clerked for Earl Warren … and, with the liberality that is our hallmark, more.