JFK, twenty years later …

John Kennedy was shot twenty years ago, and the world mourned a lost, young, romantic leader. But recently historians have been asking: Was he really a great President? Or was he an implacable Cold Warrior, disguised as a king in Camelot? William E. Leuchtenburg sums up the current thinking.

Shadowland revisited …

Before the moviemakers came, it was just a beautiful piece of California real estate; then it was Hollywood ! In a festive holiday section on American moviemaking, Kevin Brownlow writes of Hollywood’s earliest years and the armed truce between the film makers and the landed gentry; another feature recalls the greatest collection of screen tough guys the world has ever known; and Joseph Schrank tells the incredible story of what it was like for an innocent New York writer to go west and work for Darryl Zanuck on a Betty Grable opus.

A permanent world’s fair …

The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (Epcot) was Walt Disney’s last great work. It was built to show how technology shapes, and will shape, our lives. The scholar of technology Elting E. Morison assesses how well it does the job.

Plus …

The curious chronicles of Sylvester Judd, a nineteenth-century antiquarian who devoted his life to the history of the little town of Hadley, Massachusetts, give us an unparalleled view of what life was like as America was born. All this you will read here, and much, much more.