Getting, spending, and lending…

Now, when all the rules have changed, Martin Mayer, the author of Madison Avenue, USA and Wall Street , reviews the two hundred years of American banking that led to the cash machine.

Scott and Ernest…

The literary historian Alfred Kazin shows how Hemingway and Fitzgerald helped define what it meant to be American in the first half of this century.

How to post your wife …

To “post” one’s wife meant to publish a formal notice in a newspaper of her shortcomings. Discontented husbands in the eighteenth century did this with great abandon; but the wives caught on soon enough and began to post right back.

Truman and MacArthur…

The clash of these mighty opposites raised one of the most profound issues that can confront a republic: Who is to wage war, the generals or the elected civilian government? Walter Karp explains how the Constitution won.

Plus…

David Davidson proves that our South American policy is no more confused now than it was forty years ago when we tried to do good in Ecuador. … Peggy Robbins tells the weird story of the Wesley brothers’ feckless efforts to bring religion to eighteenth-century Georgia. They did better later as the founders of Methodism. … The caricaturist Edward Sorel recalls such lost pleasures as house calls, servants for the middle classes, and guilt-free chain smoking. … From the Avery Library of Architecture and Fine Arts at Columbia University we offer some beautiful architectural renderings never published before. All this and still more.