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Some 20 years ago, a friend let me leaf through several photograph albums compiled by his grandfather, an Army surgeon who had spent the 1880s and 1890s stationed at dusty Western outposts, helping to keep a wary eye on the Indians, only recently subdued.
In 1820, their daily existence was practically medieval; 30 later, many of them were living the modern life.
It is a commonplace that the American Revolution determined the political destiny of the country. Far less noted is the fact that the revolution’s consequences, profound as they were, had little, if any, impact on the daily existence of most Americans.
A restaurant critic who’s a food historian and the fortunate recipient of an Italian grandmother’s cooking follows the course of America’s favorite ethnic fare in its rise from spaghetti and a red-checked tablecloth to carpaccio and fine bone china.
Should the Smithsonian Institution ever wish to display an example of a prototypical Italian-American restaurant, it could do no better than to move Mario’s, lock, stock, and baròlo, from the Bronx to Washington, D.C.
The urge to move documents as fast as possible has always been a national preoccupation because it has always been a necessity. Faxes and Federal Express are just the latest among many innovations for getting the message across.
Reaching out and touching someone hasn’t always been easy—especially if it was necessary to hand that person something in the process.
It cannot be measured in dollars alone. It involved a kind of personal power that no man of affairs will ever have again.
On the night of Thursday, October 24, 1907, nearly every important banker in New York was meeting in J. P. Morgan’s exquisite private library, located next to his house at the northeast corner of Madison Avenue and Thirty-sixth Street.
In the years between the dedication of the Statue of Liberty and the First World War, the Divine Sarah was, for hundreds of thousands of Americans, the single most compelling embodiment of the French republic.
During Sarah Bernhardt’s 1912–13 American tour, the souvenir program for La Dame aux Camélias quoted Mark Twain: “There are five kinds of actresses: bad actresses, fair actresses, good actresses, g
Stempel’s winning technique was simplicity itself: He got all the questions in advance.
In October 1956, the 29-year-old scion of an illustrious American literary family took up a suggestion that countless Americans were then making to their more erudite friends and relations.
New Yorkers recall 1939 as the year of the great World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow. But that’s just more Eastern provincialism. Take a look at what was going on in San Francisco.
A newspaper article the other day informed me that the late 1930s are back in fashion. Historical societies are girding to protect Art Deco. The clarinet of Benny Goodman is heard on compact discs.
Wherever you travel in this country, you have a good chance of bringing a piece of the past home with you.
I drove 20,000 and got just one real bargain. That was up the Hudson River on a boisterous, wind-scrubbed October day 15 years ago.
It was the best time and place to be alive in since the world began, and everybody knew it. “I remember,” wrote F.
All through the 1920s, eager young emigrants left the towns and farms of America and headed for New York City. One of them recalls the magnetism of the life that pulled him there.
And still they come.
The old school is alive with the memory of men like Lee, Grant, Pershing, and Eisenhower.
Each year, most of West Point’s three million visitors enter the U.S. Military Academy through the Thayer Gate.
George Templeton Strong was not a public man, and he is not widely known today. But, for 40 years, he kept the best diary, in both historic and literary terms, ever written by an American.
Who was George Templeton Strong, and why single out for special attention a conservative and supercilious New York lawyer who is remembered chiefly, if at all, for a diary he kept between the years 1835 and 1875?
He said that his critics didn’t like his work because it was “too noisy,” but he didn’t care what any of them said. George Luks’ determination to paint only what interested him was his greatest strength and his greatest weakness.
Probing westward along the streets of Manhattan, the first light of Sunday, October 29,1933 revealed, stretched out in a doorway on Sixth Avenue, near Fifty-second Street, under the el, a well-dressed elderly man, solidly built and balding, with a little patc
A knowledgeable and passionate guide takes us for a walk down Wall Street, and we find the buildings there eloquent of the whole history of American finance
One of the pleasant burdens of friendship, and of living in a renowned and intimidating great city like New York, is that friends planning to visit will ask me to show them the sights of some quarter of town, most usually in the borough of Manhattan, county o
For the children and grandchildren of a poor boy from Pennsylvania, childhood was magic
BORN IN 1839 TO AN EMIGRANT COBBLER and his wife, Henry Phipps, Jr., grew up near Pittsburgh. Determined to escape the “despised” cobbler’s bench, he succeeded, eventually becoming a partner of his boyhood neighbor, Andrew Carnegie.
Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner for 150 Years
SINCE NEW YORK CITY IS WHERE, AT ONE TIME OR ANOTHER, MOST OF THE MONEY IN THE COUNTRY tends to migrate, it is not surprising that it seems to have almost as many jewelry stores as it does restaurants.
From Fort Ticonderoga to the Plaza Hotel, from Appomattox Courthouse to Bugsy Siegel’s weird rose garden in Las Vegas, the present-day scene is enriched by knowledge of the American past
A biographer who knows it well tours Franklin Roosevelt’s home on the Hudson and finds it was not so much the President’s castle as it was his formidable mother’s.
For better than four years now I have been writing about Franklin Roosevelt’s youth, seeking the sources of the serene selfassurance that served him and his country so well during the two worst crises since the Civil War.
A distinguished American poet recalls one of his more unusual jobs
When I was twenty-five, I spent a year tutoring the son of the king of Siam and his friend, the son of the Siamese prime minister. Fifty-five years later I am still filled with wonder when I think about it.
With its roots in the medically benighted eighteenth century, and its history shaped by the needs of the urban poor, Bellevue has emerged on its 250th anniversary as a world-renowned center of modern medicine
Bellevue Hospital, the oldest hospital in the United States, turned 250 last year. It started as a six-bed ward for the poor, part of an almshouse on lower Broadway, back in 1736, when New York had a population of about nine thousand. As the city grew, Bellevue grew.
Since 1930, more than half of America’s splendid elm trees have succumbed to disease. But science is now fighting back and gaining ground.
They left behind great names —the Divine Elm, the Justice Elm, the Pride of the State, the Green Tree.
Despite his feeling that “we are beginning to lose the memory of what a restrained and civil society can be like,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the senior senator from New York, and a lifelong student of history, remains an optimist about our system of government and our resilience as a people.
My father, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, grew up in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen and is now, at 59, the senior senator from his home state.
The vast jumble of objects that once brought solace to an eccentric heiress has become a great museum of the middle class.
When Margaret Woodbury Strong died in her sleep on July 17, 1969, the demise of the 72-year-old widow did not go unnoticed in Rochester, New York. For one thing, Mrs. Strong was one of Rochester’s richest inhabitants.
Lorenzo Da Ponte, New York bookseller and Pennsylvania grocer, was a charming ne’er-do-well in the eyes of his fellow Americans. He happened, also, to have written the words for Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro.
It was to be a historic moment, the opening of the very first authentic production of an Italian opera in America, in November 1825.
It might seem that building a mausoleum to the great general would be a serenely melancholy task. Not at all. The bitter squabbles that surrounded the memorial set city against country and became a mirror of the forces that were straining turn-of-the-century America.
When Groucho Marx asked, “Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?” on “You Bet Your Life,” he was offering unsuccessful competitors, battered by his heckling and bewildered by the game, a chance for redemption and some easy money.
The Civil War ignited the basic conflict between a free press and the need for military security. By war’s end, the hard-won compromises between soldiers and journalists may not have provided all the answers, but they had raised all the modern questions.
General William Tecumseh Sherman was a good hater, and he hated few things more than newspapermen. His encounter with the correspondent Floras B.
Have historians underestimated the importance of Roosevelt’s 24-year struggle with the disease that made him a paraplegic?
The afternoon of August 26, 1933 was warm and sunny in Poughkeepsie, and a large crowd had gathered on the Vassar College campus for a Dutchess County reception in honor of the area’s most illustrious citizen, Franklin Roosevelt.
Israel Sack made a fortune by seeing early on the craft in fine old American furniture.
To a casual passerby on East Fifty-seventh Street in Midtown Manhattan, No. 15 looks like any other small, wellkept building. On the main floor is an antique-silver shop.
He was the most naturally gifted of The Eight, and his vigorous, uninhibited vision of city life transformed American painting at the turn of the century. In fact, he may have been too gifted.
Never at an art exhibition in this city has there been such an attendance,” the young painter Guy Pène du Bois reported in the New York American for February 4, 1908, adding that “only with the greatest difficulty, by
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