Saving New Orleans
In a new book, "Patriot Fire," the author of "Forrest Gump" paints an uncommonly vivid picture of an overlooked chapter in American history -- and its unlikely hero.
August 2006 |
By Winston Groom
Airmail Letter
Stale Mail: The nation's first hot-air balloon postal deliveries barely got off the ground.
August 2006 |
By Owen Edwards
Camelot
In the mid-1800's, "ships of the desert" reported for duty in the Southwest.
July 2006 |
By Owen Edwards
Tocqueville's America
The French author's piquant observations on American gumption and political hypocrisy sound remarkably contemporary 200 years after his birth
July 2005 |
By Clell Bryant
Chief Lobbyist
He made little headway with President Grant, but Red Cloud won over the 19th century's greatest photographers.
June 2005 |
By Anne Broache
Tribal Fever
Twenty-five years ago this month, smallpox was officially eradicated. For the Indians of the high plains, it came a century and a half too late
May 2005 |
By Landon Y. Jones
When the Shooting Started
A century and a half ago, Britain's Roger Fenton pioneered the art of war photography
October 2004 |
By Vicki Goldberg
Remembering the Alamo
Move over, John Wayne. John Lee Hancock's epic re-creation of the 1836 battle between Mexican forces and Texas insurgents casts the mythic massacre in a more historically accurate light
April 01, 2004 |
By Bruce Selcraig
Capitol Discovery
Senate staffers come across a historic treasure in a dusty storage room
June 2003 |
By Philip Kopper
Still Ahead of His Time
Born 200 years ago this month, Ralph Waldo Emerson had some strange ideas about the natural world. Recent research suggests they might even be true
May 2003 |
By Frederick Turner
Chilly Reception
Dr. John Gorrie found the competition all fired up when he tried to market his ice-making machine
July 2002 |
By Minna Scherlinder Morse
Hell's Bells
The 19th-century trolley bell may have ding-ding-dinged, but the factory bell clanged the workday
May 2002 |
By Kim Roberts
Portraits on the Plains
Armed with easel, palette and pencil, George Catlin went west in the 1830s to paint the real "Wild West"
May 2000 |
By Edwards Park
A Painter of Angels Became the Father of Camouflage
Turn-of-the-century artist Abbott Thayer created images of timeless beauty and a radical theory of concealing coloration
April 1999 |
By Richard Meryman
The Vote That Failed
Old style ballots cast illegally in Indiana helped topple a president then he helped topple them
November 1998 |
By S.J. Ackerman
Tea and Sisterhood
In 1848 when it came time to declare the rights of women, this tilt-top table provided solid support
October 1998 |
By Valerie Jablow
Stamps What an Idea!
New commemoratives look like our first stamps, which were slow to catch on in 1847
January 1998 |
By John Ross
Facing a Bumpy History
The much-maligned theory of phrenology gets a tip of the hat from modern neuroscience
October 1997 |
By Minna Morse
John Brown's Picture
A long-lost daguerrotype, made by a black artist in 1847, has lately come to rest at the Smithsonian
August 1997 |
By Edwards Park
The Object at Hand
A bejeweled box from a sorely beset emperor leads to a Yankee dentist, and how he rescued the beautiful empress Eugénie from a Paris mob
March 1997 |
By Edwards Park
