Issue


Featured Articles

The Great American Motel

Author: Paul Lancaster

You’d never recognize it today. Perhaps this will refresh your memory.

A New Kind Of American Plan

Author:

Victorian art, collected for patriotism and profit, finds a home in a New York hotel 19

Does The West Have A Death Wish?

Author: Dyan Zaslowsky

Before there were Western states, there were public lands—over a billion acres irrevocably reserved for the people of the United States. The Sagebrush Rebels are the most recent in a series of covetous groups bent on “regaining” what was never theirs.

The Best Girl Scout Of The Mall

Author: Martha Saxton

How Juliette “Daisy” Low, an unwanted child, a miserable wife, a lonely widow, finally found happiness as the founder of the Girl Scouts of America

The Week The World Watched Selma

Author: Stephen B. Oates

A century after passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, many Southern blacks still were denied the vote. In 1965 Martin Luther King, Jr, set out to change that—by marching through the heart of Alabama.

America’s First National Cemetery

Author: Wayne Barrett

Buried here, along with hundreds of congressmen and various Indian chiefs, are Mathew Brady, John Philip Sousa, and J. Edgar Hoover

The Great Seal

Author: E. McClung Fleming

… on its 200th anniversary. It took six years and seven tries—by such men as Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams—to come up with the official symbol of the United States. But what in the world does it mean?

Mr. Harriman Requests The Pleasure Of Your Company

Author: Kay Sloan

Was it science, sport, or the prospect of a round-the-world railroad that sent the tycoon off on his costly Alaskan excursion?

If Tocqueville Could See Us Now

Author: Ken Auletta

In a new book, the political journalist and columnist Richard Reeves retraces Alexis de Tocqueville’s remarkable 1831-32 journey through America. Reeves's conclusion: Tocqueville not only deserves his reputation as the greatest observer of our democracy—he is an incomparable guide to what is happening in our country now.

“Suddenly, There Were The Americans”

Author: John Keegan

A British schoolboy sees the quiet English countryside come alive with excitement toward the end of 1943 when …