American Heritage

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] HALF A CENTURY AFTER ENGINES touched pilot to pilot at Promontory, Utah, to complete the first transcontinental railroad, the imprint of the Iron Road was nearly everywhere in the American West. Some enthusiastic real estate...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] BY EARLY MORNING OF July 5, 1758, more than a thousand Albany-built bateaux, whaleboats, and three radeaux--cumbersome barges known as "floating castles"--crowded the calm waters of New York's Lake George in orderly columns....

IN HIS NEW BOOK, The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (Norton, 256 pages, $24.95), Seth Shulman states that the famous inventor "was plagued by a secret: he stole the key idea behind the invention of the telephone." In this...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] AMERICA'S GREATEST LEADER was its first--George Washington. He ran two start-ups, the army and the presidency, and chaired the most important committee meeting in U.S. history, the Constitutional Convention. His agribusiness...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ONLY THREE MILES FROM the White House, the house in northwest Washington, D.C., offered Abraham Lincoln a refuge from the capital's summertime heat and political pressures. The 16th president spent an estimated one-quarter...

A QUARTER CENTURY AGO, President Ronald Reagan delivered two masterful addresses within two weeks of one another: the so-called "Evil Empire" and "Star Wars" speeches. In them, Reagan laid out two great strategies for dismantling the Soviet Empire....

TO WRITE A GREAT BOOK choose a great theme, said Herman Melville, one of the sages, fools, and common folk who appear in this vivid panorama of tragic history. So let us now praise Drew Gilpin Faust for tackling such a theme in This Republic of Suffering:...