Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Henry Ford
1. 1606: The Virginia Company is formed to seek profit from a new business: American settlement.
2. 1612: John Rolfe plants West Indian tobacco in Virginia, the cash crop that assures the colony’s success.
How a debt-ridden banana republic became the greatest economic engine the world has ever known
The New York City Fire Museum is in a century-old firehouse on Spring Street.
The literature pants harder and harder to keep up with the proliferation of innovations, but, with a gun to my head, this is for the general reader looking for a short list of books that are technically sophisticated, yet highly readable.
The Model T Ford made the world we live in. On the 100th anniversary of the company Henry Ford founded, his biographer Douglas Brinkley tells how.
"I will build a motor car for the great multitude,” Henry Ford proclaimed to the public when he announced the machine that would change America and indeed the world.
“So, a Ford dealer comes up with a great idea.…” Actually, I’m not at all sure this is how Americans started off a joke in the first two decades of the 20th century, but it’s how I remember my father’s answering my question about whether his fath
His first memory was of a green lampshade in his father’s study. His second was of fury and frustration. His mother, father, and older brother, Win, were going up from the Stanford University campus, where he’d been born, to San Francisco, where the fleet was.
One day toward the end of his, life Henry Ford was talking with a local boy named John Dahlinger about the state of things, and they got onto the subject of education.
What you owe your car ... Ending the tyranny of the horse is only the beginning of it.
THE AUTOMOBILE IS NOT AN AMERICAN invention. But an industry capable of manufacturing automobiles in vast numbers at prices the common man can afford most certainly is. And it is this invention that changed the world.
George Selden never built a car himself, but he did manage to secure a patent on every auto manufactured.
The usual image of invention is of the solitary genius struggling in his garret with an idea only he has faith in. One day, he shouts, “Eureka!” and the world changes. Sometimes this is actually the case.
The single best-selling American car isn’t a car at all. It’s a pickup truck. Here’s how it rose from farm hand to fashion accessory.
WHEN CLINT EASTWOOD ROLLS INTO MERYL Streep’s Iowa driveway in The Bridges of Madison County (1995), he is driving a clapped-out 1963 GMC pickup truck.
Every spring, 30,000,000 Americans watch the Indianapolis 500. It’s the nation’s premier racing event and the pinnacle of a glamorous, murderous epic that stretches back nearly a century.
May is a month of traditions: of flowers and commencements, of the Kentucky Derby for 117 years and Indianapolis five-hundred-mile races for 81. For an automobile race, Indy is ancient.
Have you heard the story of the man who almost made a fortune in the soft-drink industry? He invented 6-Up.
I spent the summer of 1964, between my junior and senior years in hish school, doing yardwork for various neighbors in the village of Bronxville, New York.
He invented modern mass-production. He gave the world the first people’s car, and Americans loved him for it. But, at the moment of his greatest triumph, he turned on the empire he had built, and on the son who would inherit it.
The Creator
A leading authority picks the top ten. Some of the names still have the power to stir the blood. And some will surprise you.
Few enterprises for any alleged expert in a given field can be more hazardous than the compilation of a “best” or “worst” list.
At a time of crisis for American labor, an organizer looks back on the turbulent 50-year career that brought him from the shop floor to the presidency of the United Automobile Workers.
Douglas A. Fraser is unusual among American union leaders of this generation. He started out as a worker, not as a professional union man, during that fervid time of union organization, the Great Depression, and witnessed the founding of his own union.
Ragtime and Reds
Hollywood ordinarily leaves American history well alone. But two of the winter’s big movies turn out to be meditations on early twentieth-century America. Ragtime , drawn from E. L.
The Rise and Fall of a Most American Dream
A little late for Christmas, the February, 1951, issue of Popular Mechanics featured an ideal gift for mechanically minded, travel-loving Americans: a two-seat, jet-powered helicopter.
What happened when the richest man in America decided to collect one of everything
The whole curious enterprise puzzled Americans in the 1920’s.
A scrappy and reckless farm boy from Ohio became America's most legendary race car driver, and his widely publicized victories in Henry Ford's racing cars helped the aspiring entrepreneur launch Ford Motor Company
New York to Los Angeles in an unheard-of 48 hours! And what a way to go—luxuriously appointed planes, meals served aloft, and a window seat for every passenger
It was midsummer of 1929, and all seemed right with the world. Herbert Hoover was in the White House, riding high on a tide of prosperity and popularity.
Henry Ford bought a $75,000 Stradivarius, learned to play “Turkey in the Straw,” and tried to teach all those Model T riders how to do-si-do like Grandpa
For four decades Henry Ford was one of America’s most original crusaders.
American Heritage Book Selection -- Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915-1933
American Heritage Book Selection -- Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915-1933
—a complex man
One of the most remarkable facts about Henry Ford is that his fame and the Ford legend were born almost simultaneously, and born full-grown. Both came late in life, when he was fifty. The industrialist, we may say without exaggeration, was little known until he suddenly became a world celebrity. He was tossed into international eminence on January 5, 1914, when the Ford Motor Company startled the globe with its “Five Dollar Day.”
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