Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Christmas
Roast pig, boiled rockfish, and apple pie were among the dishes George and Martha enjoyed during the holiday in 1797. Here are some actual recipes.
It was cold and long but it brought magic and the children loved it
Fifty years ago winter was still pretty much the season of discontent. Time out of mind poets had abused and libeled it. They said that winter brought snarling gusts to nibble the juiceless leaves. They charged that plague and pestilence came with it. Every mile was two in winter. It tamed man, woman and beast. He who passed a winter’s day escaped an enemy. A sad tale was best for winter.
Kevin Baker ’s most recent historical novel is Strivers Row .
Allen Barra writes American Heritage ’s “Screenings” column.
Cocktails Bitters are back
Cocktails Bitters are back
Historically it was the addition of bitters to alcoholic beverages in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that defined a new category of mixed drinks called the cocktail. The word first appeared in print in 1806 in a New York periodical called The Balance, and Columbian Repository.
American Heritage’s editors and contributors survey the historical offerings of recent months, and pick their favorites from a field wide enough to include movies, restaurants, furniture, cocktails, hotels, cookies, wristwatches—and artifacts retrieved from the statero
Thomas Edison's gift to the Christmas season
Here are 12 classic holiday movies worth seeing when you can’t sit through It’s a Wonderful Life one more time.
Some of the best moments in hundreds of movies took place at Christmastime. And the author may have seen every one of them.
Christmas hasn’t been all that merry on the screen in the past couple of decades.
A World War I soldier writes home about the Christmas holiday in his hospital, "one of the merriest, happiest seasons of my life"
Illustrated with late-nineteenth-century magic-lantern slides Together with a brief inquiry into a Christmas mystery
When up on the roof there arose such a clatter That Herbert rushed out to see what was the matter
On Christmas morning of 1929 Fire Marshal C. G. Achstetter of Washington, D.C., commenced the tedious paperwork that follows a $135,000 fire.
Many a book, a magazine, a play, a movie, has been banned in Boston. But Christmas?
Many a book, a magazine, a play, a movie, has been banned in Boston. But Christmas?
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