Public lands and private longing…

The so-called Sagebrush Rebellion in the West has leaped into the news in recent months as if it had no past—but as the environmental historian Dyan Zaslowsky points out, the attempt to seize public lands for private purposes in this country has a long history.

A march to Montgomery …

It was 1965, nearly a century after the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment, and still blacks in much of the American South were not allowed to vote. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., sought to change all that with a mass march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital at Montgomery. Alabama was just as determined to stop him. In a story taut with violence and passion, Stephen B. Oates tells us how victory was won.

A D-day vignette…

There was, I reflected … something going on in the West of England about which Hitler should be very worried indeed.” And so there was, as British military historian John Keegan recounts in his boyhood memories of the months in 1944 during which American military might gathered itself in England—and then disappeared for the invasion of Normandy and the long road to war’s end.

Plus…

The birth of the Girl Scouts; the growth of that quintessentially American institution, the motel; and much more, all of it richly illustrated.