Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Theodore Roosevelt
As a young man, Theodore Roosevelt struggled through a brutal winter on a cattle ranch in the Dakota Territory. The adventure launched a love affair with the western U.S.
Editor's Note: H.W. Brands is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of twenty books on American history, including two that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.
Muir struggled for decades to create and protect Yosemite National Park, and helped launch the American environmental movement.
In 1903, Presiden
TR’s zeal for athletics helped lead to the emergence of modern sports in America, including interscholastic competition, the NCAA, the World Series, and the first Olympics in the U.S.
Although his flamboyant successor, Theodore Roosevelt, greatly overshadowed him, William McKinney deserves credit for establishing the United States as a global power, acquiring Hawaii and Puerto Rico, establishing the “fair trade” doctrine, and paving the way for TR’s accomplishments.
Theodore Roosevelt, his widow recalled, watched Lincoln’s funeral from his grandfather’s house
As a Rough Rider in the Spanish-American War, Theodore Roosevelt’s attention to nature and love of animals were much in evidence, characteristics that would later help form his strong conservationist platform as president
ON JUNE 3, 1898, 39 days into the Spanish-American War, Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders arrived in Florida by train, assigned to the U.S. transport Yucatan. But the departure date from Tampa Bay for Cuba kept changing.
It’s always been the Republicans.
GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER
Skirmishing about environmentalism may well continue forever, but the major war is over. It lasted far longer than most people realize.
Smarter than stupid, of course, but does the intellectual tradition that began with the century suggest that there's such a thing as being too smart for the country’s good?
David McCullough explains why he thinks that history is the most challenging, exhilarating, and immediate of subjects.
The English journalist has spent more than a decade preparing a book on this country’s role in the most eventful hundred years since the race began. He liked what he found enough to become an American himself.
The naturalist Aldo Leopold not only gave the wilderness idea its most persuasive articulation; he offered a way of thinking that turned the entire history of land use on its head.
The trouble began at midmorning on Wednesday, April 21, 1948, when a neighboring farm’s trash fire got out of control.
Americans invented the grand hotel in the 1830s, and, during the next century, brought it to a zenith of democratic luxury that makes a visit to the surviving examples the most agreeable of historic pilgrimages.
At the turn of the eighteenth century, a story went around Connecticut about a pious old woman who was berating her nephew for being such a rake. And an aging rake, at that. “But we’re not so very different,” he insisted.
After every war in the nation’s history, the military has faced not only calls for demobilization, but new challenges and new opportunities. It is happening again.
Not many people appreciate a military base closing. Like the shutting of a factory, it can devastate nearby towns, throwing thousands of people out of work. Merchants face losses and even bankruptcy as sales fall off.
They’ve all had things to say about their fellow chief executives. Once in a great while, one was even flattering.
John Adams said that Thomas Jefferson’s mind was “eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, confused, uninformed, and ignorant.” Ulysses S.
Most of our presidents have been avid athletes, even Taft. Could a party safely nominate an overweight and unabashed couch potato who scorned exercise?
Right now, of course, it is the coming election that provides most of the material on which this column casts its regular history-conscious eye. But not this time. September is the month of pennant races, and I’ve got baseball as well as Presidents on my mind.
Ninety years ago, a high-born zealot named Gifford Pinchot knew more about woodlands than any man in America. What he did about them changed the country we live in and helped define environmentalism.
Like most public officials, Governor Gifford Pinchot of Pennsylvania could not answer all his mail personally. Much of it had to be left to aides, but not all of these realized the character of their boss.
Not every memorable historic moment is on a grand scale. Here is a look at some of the bizarre, true sidelights that add sparkle to the larger picture.
A year ago, we were in the midst of a presidential campaign most memorable for charges by both sides that the opponent was not hard enough, tough enough, masculine enough. That he was, in fact, a sissy. Both sides also admitted that this sort of rhetoric was deplorable. But it’s been going on since the beginning of the republic.
Just before George Bush announced his running mate in 1988, a one-liner going the rounds was that he should choose Jeane Kirkpatrick to add some machismo to the ticket.
More than a year ago, the American government began to huff and puff at the house of Panama’s military strong man, Manuel Noriega. Washington is red in the face, but Noriega’s walls are still standing.
SMU isn’t playing this season; men on the team were accepting money from alumni. That’s bad, of course; but today’s game grew out of even-greater scandal.
In October of 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt, who had recently intervened in a national coal strike and the Russo-Japanese War, turned his formidable attention to another kind of struggle.
Union Station in wartime Washington. A young man in a Navy uniform escorts a short, stocky blonde woman in her 50s along the crowded platform toward a waiting train.
You Asked for It
When American Heritage suggested last year that I put together the article that became “101 Things Every College Graduate Should Know about American History,” I accepted the assignment eagerly.
If the historians themselves are no longer interested in defining the structure of the American past, how can the citizenry understand its heritage? The author examines the disrepair in which the professors have left their subject.
In the mid-sixteenth century, a blind and deaf old Spanish soldier named Bernai Díaz del Castillo set out to write an account of what he had seen and done as a follower of Hernando Cortés during the conquest of Mexico.
The unveiling of the Statue of Liberty was not the only event that stirred the passions of New Yorkers in 1886.
The crisis swept over France and Germany and Britain alike, and they all nearly foundered. Now more than ever, it is important to remember that it didn’t just happen here.
Back in 1955, John Kenneth Galbraith called the Great Depression of the 1930s “the most momentous economic occurrence in the history of the United States,” and 30-odd years later that judgment, recorded in Galbraith’s bestseller, The Great Crash
This is not a test. It’s the real thing.
How precise is the educated American’s understanding of the history of our country? I don’t mean exact knowledge of minor dates, or small details about the terms of laws, or questions like “Who was secretary of war in 1851?” ( Answer: Charles M.
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