American Heritage

If celebrity death tells us about celebrity life, then one great celebrity death of 1997 was a mother lode of information. The untimeliness contributed to the universal sense of shock, as did the violence, while the unsolved mysteries of the case added...

On July 28 Thomas Lovelace, brother of the royal governor of New York, rowed to Manhattan from his Staten Island farm with an urgent message: Dutch warships had been spotted approaching the city. Nine years earlier, with a similar naval invasion,...

When the lives of a failed prizefighter, an aging horsebreaker, and a bicycle-repairman-turned-overnight-millionaire converged around a battered little horse named Seabiscuit, the result captivated the nation and transcended their sport On a drab detroit...

In a century of technological revolutions, this was perhaps the quietest It is one of the most famous one-word lines in the history of Hollywood: "Plastics." But however intergenerationally challenged that half-drunk friend of Dustin Hoffman's parents...

In a tranquil Cape Cod village, the past is writ in glass A tourist's itinerary published by the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce deals briskly with the Cape's oldest town: "11:00 A.M. Arrive Sandwich, Visit Sandwich Glass Museum, Dexter Grist Mill,...

It took place very early, but its unexpected consequences have vibrated through every decade When J. P. Morgan formed U.S. Steel, the first billion-dollar corporation, in 1901, it marked not only his signature deal but the apogee of banker power...

Everyone who knows anything at all about American history believes that Warren G. Harding was our worst President--Harding, the affable fool from Marion, Ohio, who, after passing two utterly undistinguished terms as state senator and one as lieutenant...

When an armistice ended the Spanish-American War on August 12, the United States found itself with three major new territories obtained in three different ways. The first was Hawaii, annexed on July 7 with the President's signature on a joint congressional...

In the past century the two major opponents on the question of free trade have changed sides completely The thunder of distant drums is sounding again as protectionists and free traders respond to President Clinton's efforts to get fast-track authority...