Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Literature
on the Writing of History
Few of our thirty-seven Presidents have been highly gifted with literary talent; of those few, fewer had the time or the patience to sit down and deliberately write books.
In the spring of 1915 a handsome fifty-nine-year-old man with a marked resemblance to Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan boarded ship in New York, bound for England.
The Rough Rider rode roughshod over writers who took liberties with Mother Nature’s children
It was an early spring evening in 1907. Theodore Roosevelt and Edward B.
In this final installment from our series on General Joseph W. Stilwell, Barbara W. Tuchman recounts the story of the old soldier’s finest hour
“I claim we got a hall of a beating”
The Literary Lights Were Always Bright at
Everyone wanted to be invited to 148 Charles Street, where Charles Dickens mixed the punch and taught the guests parlor games, John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe vied in telling ghost stories, and Nathaniel Hawthorne paced the bedroom floor one unhappy night in t
True classics never die. But sometimes second-rate works also acquire unique longevity. Take Uncle Tom’s Cabin , born in 1852.
“History,” writes Professor John A. Garraty in the introduction to his new book, “is made up of facts, but also of opinions … Opinions are easily formed, but are as evanescent as ice in August.
The lady author modelled her famous fictional creation after her own wonder boy —and condemned a generation of “manly little chaps” to velvet pants and curls
In the November, 1885, issue of St.
Sixteen years before Pearl Harbor an English naval expert uncannily prophesied in detail the war in the Pacific. Now comes evidence that the Japanese heeded his theories—but not his warnings
As soon as Imperial Japan destroyed the Russian Navy in a spectacular sea battle at the Straits of Tsushima in 1905, a rash of would-be Cassandras began to foretell the day when the rays of the Rising Sun would spread eastward across the Pacific, bringing Jap
Bronson Alcott and his transcendental friends hardly ever stopped talking. It left almost no time for mundane things like food and shelter
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