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June/July 1984 | Volume 35, Issue 4
Coming Up In American Heritage …
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
In the first nine months of 1983 Americans spent $9.5 billion to air-condition their homes, offices, and factories. It all began with an idea that came to Willis Carrier in 1902, an idea that effected a total transformation in the way we live now. Robert Friedman tells the amazing story. Jules Tygiel reports on what happened when a black lieutenant in the United States Army refused to sit in the back of the bus. Just what did the Founding Fathers mean by the First Amendment? What has the Supreme Court said they meant about the relationship of church and state? The historian Richard Morris finds some surprising answers. In our “What’s Happening in History” feature, Prof. H. Wayne Morgan takes a new look at the stereotypes and the gilt of the Gilded Age. Emily Beck, latest in a long line of editors of Bartlett’s Quotations , explains how this great work was born and how it became the most popular reference work in the English-speaking world. … Peter Andrews on the American army helmet which, for very good reasons, tends to make our forces look like the Wehrmacht. … In addition to all this, the eye will feast on the folk art produced by the dawn of the railroads and on some splendid treasures from our National Archives. And that is, by no means, all.