Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH OUR ARCHIVES!
Mexico
A hurricane sank a fleet in Pensacola Bay 450 years ago, dooming the first major European attempt to colonize North America, a story that archaeologists are just now fleshing out.
On August 15, 1559, the bay now known as Pensacola slowly filled with a curious fleet of 11 Spanish vessels, their decks crammed with an odd mix of colonists, and holds filled to bursting with supplies and ceramic jars of olive oil and wine from Cadiz. Aboard the 570-ton flagship Jesus stood the wealthy and ambitious Don Tristan de Luna y Arellano, with direct orders from the king of Spain to establish a permanent colony in La Florida. The rest of the fleet included two galleons, beamy cargo ships known as naos, small barques, and a caravel.
North America had never before seen anything like it on this scale.
How a J. P. Morgan partner and the former Secretary of the Navy defused a revolution just by being good guys
As I sweep the leavings of the 1996 election campaign from my data bank, two antagonistic names emerge with renewed clarity: Jesse Helms and Fidel Castro. Helms is the newly re-elected senator from North Carolina and the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee.
He may have been the greatest caricaturist of all time; he has imitators to this day. But his true passion was for a very different discipline.
The trouble was, he couldn’t say no to anyone.
The problem is classically simple to state, and impossibly difficult to solve. One country invades and subdues another. Third-party nations protest and insist on the aggressor’s withdrawal but are unwilling or unable to enforce their demand by war.
On the 150th anniversary of Texan independence, we trace the fierce negotiations that brought the republic into the union.
From the moment he entered the White House in March 1829, Andrew Jackson of Tennessee turned a cold and calculating eye on Texas.
Starting with 30 “liberated” rifles, Augusto Sandino forced American troops out of Nicaragua in 1933.
Rear Admiral Julian L. Latimer stood on the bridge of his flagship, the USS Rochester, as it nosed into the harbor of Puerto Cabezas, on Nicaragua’s northeastern Mosquito Coast.
It’s our most important, profitable, and adaptable crop—the true American staple. But where did it come from?
In 1748 an inquisitive Swede named Peter Kalm, a protégé of the great botanist Linnaeus, came to America to find plants that could be useful in his country. He went around asking questions of everybody about everything.
The man was Diego Rivera, seen from the rear on his scaffold in an uncharacteristically modest self-portrait at left, and what he was doing in America was expressing his gargantuan contempt for capitalism and its precepts.
The period between Mexican independence and the constitution of 1917 was turbulent and painful
In the bright mestizo tapestry of Mexico’s thirty centuries of civilization, the Indian, the Spanish, and the modern threads interweave—and tangle
About one hundred years ago a roaring hurricane swept along the Mexican border with such fury that it radically changed the course of the Rio Grande—and consequently altered the international boundary. When the storm finally subsided, the village of El Paso, Texas, was about 630 acres larger, and the bawdy little pueblo of Juárez, Mexico, was that many acres smaller.
Forty years ago, American Marines tangled with a tough Latin-American guerrilla leader whose tactics against “the capitalists” would evoke an unhappy shock of recognition in Vietnam today.
The United States was first introduced to the vexations of large-scale guerrilla warfare forty years ago in the mountain jungles of Nicaragua.
One innovation profoundly changed—and prolonged—the culture of the Plains Indians
When Pancho Villa sacked an American town, Pershing was ordered to find him and bring him to book. But the orders failed to say where — or how
Magnificent Central American ruins, overgrown by the thickening jungle, testify to a sophisticated culture already ancient when Columbus sailed
Featured Authors
