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The Best Essays of 2022

The Editors | November/December 2022

From the life of Lincoln to the late David McCullough, here are the top 10 stories that fascinated our readers in 2022.

Every year, we look back on our published issues to see how we did with our readers. We like to look at which subjects were most popular, which essays elicited the strongest responses, and which were most read. The results are always different, and always fascinating.

Overrated & Underrated

May/June 1999

Should John Adams, Ebbets Field, the 60s, and Tocqueville be knocked off their pedestals? Are Ben Franklin and Bob and Ray far greater than you ever imagined? Our second annual survey asks experts in every field what reputation is the most inflated and what’s most underappreciated.

Adage Ad Campaign Autobiography or Journal Ballpark Ballplayer Classic Children’s Book City Civil War General Conspiracy Theory Decade Education Initiative Environmental Program Event in This Century Fashion Designer Feminist Folk or Self-taught Artist Founding Father Gangster Historic Place Humorist Idea Invention Journalistic Trend Magician Military Aircraft Motorcycle Philanthropist Photographer Political Boss Rock Band Science Fiction Writer Songwriter Spy Toy Traditional Dish War Correspondent Western

MOSQUITOES, MULES, AND MEN

Bruce Le Roy | April 1965

On a government surveying party in the Pacific Northwest eighty-five years ago, nothing was more valuable than a sense of humor. Topographer Alfred Downing had one that happily showed in his sketches

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Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.