<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> … you could battle for clean government, champion virtue, improve the public school, defend the consumer, arbitrate taste, and write lean, telling prose. Or at least that was the author’s dream. Here’s the reality.</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> The author recalls two generations of “Cliffie” life—hers and her mother’s—in the years when male and female education took place on opposite sides of the Cambridge Common and women were expected to wear hats in Harvard Square</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> It was a great life being a contract writer for a major studio during the high noon of the American movie industry—but it could also be a nightmare. A survivor recalls the pleasures and ardors of working at 20th Century-Fox forty years ago.</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"><span class="typestyle">An extraordinary World War I naval operation is recounted by the commander of a decaying coastal steamer crammed with a terrifying new explosive</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> Years after one of the bloodiest and most intense battles of the war in the Pacific, a Marine Corps veteran returns to Tarawa</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> Along this narrow stretch of sand, all the painstaking plans for the Normandy invasion fell apart. One of the men who was lucky enough to make it past the beachhead recalls a day of fear, chaos, grief—and triumph.</span> </p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> The great man’s daughter-in-law draws a portrait of the statesman at the top of his career and at the bottom</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> A thousand miles behind enemy lines, Liberator bombers struck Hitler’s Rumanian oil refineries, then headed home flying so low that some came back with cornstalks in their bomb bays</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> All this Florida boy wanted to do was rejoin his regiment. Instead they drafted him into the Confederate secret service.</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck">After a year at the University of Missouri studying American history, a Chinese professor tells what she discovered about us and how she imparts her new knowledge to the folks back home.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Despite his feeling that “we are beginning to lose the memory of what a restrained and civil society can be like,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the senior senator from New York, and a lifelong student of history, remains an optimist about our system of government and our resilience as a people.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">George Templeton Strong was not a public man, and he is not widely known today. But, for 40 years, he kept the best diary, in both historic and literary terms, ever written by an American.</span></p>
<p>An American soldier would never forget encountering the German with an icy smile. He would later discover that the blood of innocent millions dripped from Eichmann's manicured hands.</p>
<p><span class="deck"> When the author moved into a 1905 house on an island near Seattle, he found himself sharing it with the uncommon people who had lived there before him</span> </p>
<p><span class="deck">The mysterious thing that happened to Lieutenant Colonel Brown over Bremen in 1943 sent the pilot off on a quest that lasted his entire life. Finally, he found the answer. It had been worth waiting for.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">In the twilight of Castro’s regime, one of the soldiers who put him in power recalls what it was like to be a<em> <span class="typestyle"> fidelista</span></em> up in the hills four decades ago when a whole new, just, democratic world was there for the building.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">A novelist joins his ancestor on a trip West and discovers in her daily travails an intimate view of a tremendous national migration.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Forty years changed almost everything, but not the author’s gleaming, troubling memories of Miss Clark. So, he went looking for her.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">He spent his tour of duty bombing German cities and made it home only to discover he could never leave the war behind him. Then, a lifetime later, he found a way to make peace.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">This magazine’s publication of wrenching wartime letters between the author’s parents brought her to international attention. At the same time, it initiated some very heartfelt conversations with our readers.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">As a ten-year-old boy, the author had a role to play in bringing Douglas MacArthur’s vision of democracy to a shattered Japan.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck"><lead_in> A LIFETIME AGO, A QUIET STRANGER</lead_in> passed through the author’s hometown and came away with a record of both personal and national importance.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck"><span class="typestyle">Connections with childhood, with a way of looking at life, and with a generation that remade our world</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Americans have been launching time capsules into the future for over a century now, and, today, we’re creating more than ever. Why is it that so few reach their destination? And that so many merely bore their recipients?</span></p>
