<p><span class="deck">SMU isn’t playing this season; men on the team were accepting money from alumni. That’s bad, of course; but today’s game grew out of even-greater scandal.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">A year ago, we were in the midst of a presidential campaign most memorable for charges by both sides that the opponent was not hard enough, tough enough, masculine enough. That he was, in fact, a sissy. Both sides also admitted that this sort of rhetoric was deplorable. But it’s been going on since the beginning of the republic.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Not every memorable historic moment is on a grand scale. Here is a look at some of the bizarre, true sidelights that add sparkle to the larger picture.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Ninety years ago, a high-born zealot named Gifford Pinchot knew more about woodlands than any man in America. What he <span class="typestyle"> did</span> about them changed the country we live in and helped define environmentalism. </span></p>
<p>Most of our presidents have been avid athletes, even Taft. Could a party safely nominate an overweight and unabashed couch potato who scorned exercise?</p>
<p><span class="deck">After every war in the nation’s history, the military has faced not only calls for demobilization, but new challenges and new opportunities. It is happening again.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Americans invented the grand hotel in the 1830s, and, during the next century, brought it to a zenith of democratic luxury that makes a visit to the surviving examples the most agreeable of historic pilgrimages.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">The naturalist Aldo Leopold not only gave the wilderness idea its most persuasive articulation; he offered a way of thinking that turned the entire history of land use on its head.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">The English journalist has spent more than a decade preparing a book on this country’s role in the most eventful hundred years since the race began. He liked what he found enough to become an American himself.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">David McCullough explains why he thinks that history is the most challenging, exhilarating, and immediate of subjects.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Smarter than stupid, of course, but does the intellectual tradition that began with the century suggest that there's such a thing as being too smart for the country’s good?</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Skirmishing about environmentalism may well continue forever, but the major war is over. It lasted far longer than most people realize.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> As a Rough Rider in the Spanish-American War, Theodore Roosevelt’s attention to nature and love of animals were much in evidence, characteristics that would later help form his strong conservationist platform as president</span> </p>
<p>Although his flamboyant successor, Theodore Roosevelt, greatly overshadowed him, William McKinney deserves credit for establishing the United States as a global power, acquiring Hawaii and Puerto Rico, establishing the “fair trade” doctrine, and paving the way for TR’s accomplishments.</p>
<p>TR’s zeal for athletics helped lead to the emergence of modern sports in America, including interscholastic competition, the NCAA, the World Series, and the first Olympics in the U.S.</p>
<p>As a young man, Theodore Roosevelt struggled through a brutal winter on a cattle ranch in the Dakota Territory. The adventure launched a love affair with the western U.S.</p>
