Archaeology in America has long passed out of the hands of the enthusiastic amateur stumbling across the occasional arrowhead. It’s the work of professionals fortified with all the technology of modern science. Their goal: to discover more and more of America’s past beneath the surface of the earth, water, and asphalt. Robert Friedman traveled the land from Manhattan to California, talked with the workers in the field and the scholars in their studies, and tells us who is digging, what they’re finding, and what it means.

Radio grows up…

In 1924 one-third of all the money Americans spent for furniture went for radio receivers; by 1934 almost half of all the radios in the world were owned by Americans. Herbert Hoover issued an early warning that this great medium should not be “drowned in advertising chatter,” but he went unheeded. Alice Marquis tells the great story of radio’s early days: a babble of sound that became comedy, music, soap operas, news, and religion. And of the unending struggle against the tyranny of sponsors.

The heart of the matter …

Some four hundred years before the birth of Christ, Hippocrates wrote, “A wound in the heart is mortal.” So, until recently, it was. The distinguished writer and surgeon William A. Nolen traces the history of modern heart surgery from its clumsy—and usually fatal—beginnings to the 112 days of life given to Barney Clark in Utah.

Plus…

Phyllis Robinson on the tangled relationship between one of America’s greatest writers, Willa Gather, and one of her greatest editors, S. S. McClure of McClure’s magazine; an eye-opening interview with Henry Kissinger by Robert Bendiner; a gallery of noble and touching photographic studies of turn-of-the-century Americans recently unearthed in an old studio in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania… and, as always, more to delight the mind and eye.