How we got Texas

I have long since been aware,” Andrew Jackson was writing as early as 1829, “of the importance of Texas to the United States.” And indeed the old warrior’s last years were consumed with the desire to have Texas in the Union. On the sesquicentennial of the territory’s violent split with Mexico, Robert V. Remini traces the course of the complex and absorbing diplomacy that led Texas into the federal fold. Remini’s story is followed by a portfolio of little-known photographs that bring the Texas story forward from statehood into the twentieth century; and William Broyles, a native son, tells us what we’re looking at.

America’s finest cars

The automobile authority Brock Yates surveys the years when our car companies turned out machines that even rich Germans wanted to own, and picks the all-time greatest. The names of some still have the power to stir the blood; others—like the 1955 Chevy Bel Air—may come as a surprise.

Great Britain’s greatest fear

In the years before the Revolution, it wasn’t that the American colonists would rise in arms; it was, as one contemporary put it, that “England will really be drained of multitudes of mechanics of all sorts, also people of considerable property … the spirit of emigration daily increases:—America that land of promise, is their cry.” Bernard Bailyn examines this all-butforgotten crisis and uses an extraordinary eighteenthcentury census to reveal just what sort of people they were that England so feared to lose.

Plus…

A Chinese professor of American history in the People’s Republic tells of her visit to the United States … the American Heritage Winter Art Show … an interview with one of Robert McNamara’s original Whiz Kids … the first real presidential debate … and, to lighten the February gloom, even more.