<p><span class="deck">The most powerful columnist who ever lived single-handedly made our current culture of celebrity, and then was destroyed by the tools he had used to build it.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">You’ve probably never heard of them, but these ten people changed your life. Each of them is a big reason why your world today is so different from anyone’s world in 1954.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">A PAIR OF GERMAN-BORN CRAFTSMEN BEGAN BY MAKING EXUBERANT FURNITURE AND WENT ON TO SHOW A NEWLY RICH GENERATION HOW TO LIVE.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Consigned to the Pennsylvania Railroad’s “Garbage Run,” they fought their own war on the home front, and they helped shape a victory as surely as their brothers and husbands did overseas.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">World War I made the city the financial capital of the world. Then, after World War II, a very few audacious painters and passionate critics made it the cultural capital, as well. Here is how they seized the torch from Europe.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">The Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery in 1865, but right on into this century, sailors were routinely drugged, beaten, and kidnapped to man America’s mighty merchant marine.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Seen in its proper historical context, amid the height of the Cold War, the investigation into Kennedy’s assassination looks much more impressive and its shortcomings much more understandable.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">He may have been the greatest caricaturist of all time; he has imitators to this day. But his true passion was for a very different discipline.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">A BOLD NEW KIND OF COLLEGE COURSE BRINGS the student directly to the past, non-stop, overnight, in squalor and glory, for weeks on end.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">HISTORY’S MOST PHOTOGENIC LABOR dispute lasted 30 days, spread to eight cities, closed 37 plays, and finally won performers some respect.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">A HALF-CENTRY AGO, Harry Dubin bought his son a camera, and, together, they made a remarkable series of photographs of a city full of blue-collar workers.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">At a time when driving from Manhattan to Yonkers was a supreme challenge, a half-dozen cars pointed their radiators west and set out from Times Square for Paris.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">ROBERT MOSES built small with the same imperial vigor as he built big, and, at his behest, the art of making scale-model cities reached its peak. The result still survives, and, although few New Yorkers know about it, they can see their whole town, right down to their own houses or apartment buildings, perfectly reproduced.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Amid a hundred mountains and a thousand lakes, a fascinating institution tells the story of America’s engagement with its Eastern wilderness.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">At the height of the American avant-garde movement, Fairfield Porter’s realistic paintings defied the orthodoxy of Abstract Expressionism and risked rejection by the art world. But today, his true stature is becoming apparent: He may just be the best we have.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Beautiful scenery abounds in the southern tier of New York’s Finger Lakes, but so does rich history, all of it intimately tied to the land.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">As Hillary Clinton campaigns for a New York Senate seat, she’d do well to study the career of another effective outsider.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">A century and a half ago, two young girls started hearing noises they said came from beyond the grave, and then embarked on a lifetime career that began a national obsession with spiritualism that has lasted to this day.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">All along its 360-mile route, towns to which the canal gave birth are looking to its powerful ghost for economic revival.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">The woman whose great-grandfather introduced pastrami to the New World explores an American institution that is as hard to define as it is easy to recognize.</span></p>
<p>The World Trade Center attack wasn’t the first time New York was brutally assaulted — 225 years before, George Washington watched the city burn from his headquarters in northern Manhattan after painful military defeats.</p>
<p>“I will leave this house only if I am dead,” the prominent New York doctor told his ex-wife, who was seeking half the value of their Manhattan townhouse in a divorce.</p>
