Search

BOURBON whiskey has had a long, rugged ride from the frontier to the top shelf AFTER TWO HUNDRED YEARS BOURBON WHISKEY APPEARS to be coming into its own. It is [...]

NEW TECHNOLOGIES DON'T ALways lead inexorably toward the future. Lately they've also been opening doors through which we can step straight into the past. One such door has let us [...]

PARK CITY, UTAH, WHERE much of this winter's Olympics will happen, is a two-boom town. It rode its first boom as a mining center for almost a century before the [...]

I was standing on top of a mountain with skis under my feet for the first time in thirty years. The instructor who had assured me I'd be able to [...]

Up fierce Mount Washington by rail and auto routes from the 1860s. I boarded the cog railway for the trip up New Hampshire's 6,288-foot Mount Washington on a sunny, warm [...]

In New Bern, North Carolina, enjoy the holidays in 1970--and 1830, and 1940 Under a dome of stars emerging from the darkening twilight, the air has a Christmasy nip to [...]

I am lying on my back looking up not just at a wide blue sky but also at sails taut with wind, oaken masts, rigging that creaks and vibrates. Beneath [...]

DID A COMPANY AND A MACHINE SPAWN EVIL? DID INTERNATIONAL Business Machines, a giant of information technology long before there were computers, have a 'conscious involvement --directly and through its [...]

WILLIAM HEWLETT AND THE BIRTH OF SILICON VALLEY IT BEGAN, AS LEGEND HAS it--and in this case the legend is true--in a one-car garage at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo [...]

WHY THE TROUBLE IN FLORIDA WAS BOUND TO HAPPEN IT WAS FITTING THAT when Y2K disaster finally struck, it did so in a way nobody had foreseen--and in a way [...]

COMPUTERS THAT COULD THINK WERE ONCE RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER. NOW THEY'RE FAR OFF. MARVIN MINSKY, THE head of the artificial intelligence laboratory at MIT, proclaimed in 1967 that 'within [...]

The high-tech wonder of 1914--now out of American Hands--helps keep the high-tech world of 2000 moving AS LAST YEAR ENDED, THREE MILLENNIAL CONCERNS OBSESSED THE public--or at least the press. [...]

And other high-tech debacles and how we learned to cope with them HIGH-TECHNOLOGY MARVELS KEEP GOING AWRY LATELY--IN cyberspace, where hackers have shown they can crash virtually any Web site [...]

And why it has to UNLESS YOU'VE NEVER BEEN ONLINE, VISITED A VIDEO-RENTAL STORE, watched cable TV, or turned on the set in a modern hotel, you know how much [...]

And why is it not really so different from patenting anything else? BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS, THE RACE TO DECODE THE ENTIRE human genome--transcribing the DNA that makes [...]

Beyond the myth of ever-faster high-tech change and radical new breaks from the past 'WE HAVE REACHED THE EPOCH OF THE NANOSECOND. THIS is the heyday of speed ... a [...]

Seeking the best of a raffish past in a richer, safer Tijuana THIS IS CULTURE SHOCK. WALK OVER THE BRIDGE AND across the border into Tijuana from the big parking [...]

ONE OF AMERICA'S GREATEST documentary filmmakers takes on America's greatest city: Ric Burns discusses his new PBS series, New York RIC BURNS'S PROJECTS HAVE GROWN EVER MORE AMBITIOUS SINCE HE [...]

The pioneers came late to Sedona, Arizona. It got paved streets and electricity in the 1950s and then grew up as a New Age mecca. If the history of European [...]

'This has been a massive, very expensive effort because we've wanted to bring George Washington back to his rightful place as first in the hearts of his countrymen.' That's how [...]

WHAT DID GEORGE WASHINGTON REALLY LOOK LIKE? We have a lot of familiar pictures of him, but they never quite agree with one another, and more were made when he [...]

IN 1970 THE FUTURIST Alvin Toffler proclaimed that 'making paper copies of anything is a primitive use of machines and violates their very spirit.' Five years later the head of [...]

IN THE EARLY 1880s, A MAINE-BORN INVENTOR NAMED Hiram Maxim, who had tried and failed to become a leading figure in the young electrical industry, met a fellow American in [...]

You don't naturally associate white-water rafting with stepping back into the past, but I discovered you can do both at once. That is, you can float down the New River [...]

Poor Fort Scott. The Kansas military post and the town beside it had their share of bad luck from the very beginning, in 1842, when the site was picked for [...]

'After the coal and steel industries collapsed, we approached our congressmen about how we could develop tourism around here. A Park Service study found that if we combined our cultural [...]

Mohonk Mountain House opened in 1870 in one of the most spectacular settings in the Eastern United States, a craggy private mountaintop with views of five states. By 1902 it [...]

Mohonk Mountain House, 75 miles north of New York City, always stayed so true to its Quaker roots as a spartan grand hotel that it didn't even serve alcohol until [...]

IT'S BEEN A BUSY FEW MONTHS. EARLY THIS YEAR Scott Masterson, my friend and colleague of a quarter-century, took the helm as president of American Heritage. Scott is a person [...]

In this article the author discusses campaign spending for the 2012 U.S. presidential election. He comments on income inequality in the U.S. by citing statistics related to income and taxation and argues that the Electoral College and presidential systems of the U.S. are elitist in nature. He overviews the economic policies of various presidents, queries whether campaign expenditures equate to election success, and discusses the emergence of super political action committees (PACs) in response to campaign finance reform. INSETS: Corporate Corruption, 19th Century Style;"Swollen Fortunes" in the Early 20th Century.

The author discusses the problems within the American healthcare system and suggests what can be done to fix it. He provides a brief history of the healthcare system in the U.S., analyzes the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) put in place by U.S. President Barack Obama, and argues that other countries have more advanced healthcare systems than America.

The article discusses the history of banking in the U.S., from the first Bank of New York founded by Alexander Hamilton in the late 1700s to the U.S. recession of 2009. Thomas Jefferson's opinions on banks, John Pierpont Morgan's response to the financial crisis of 1893, and the founding of the Federal Reserve in 1913 are discussed, as well as the gold standard, national debt, and the economic aspects of democracy.

The article discusses the two-party system in American politics, and presents the author's opinion that it is necessary and useful. The history of the Republican and Democratic parties is briefly outlined, and the assertion that the tension between the desire for a small government and large, active one has always been the defining characteristic of U.S. politics is offered.

This article discusses the history of Social Security welfare in the U.S., with a focus on the evolution of the financial aspects of the system. Topics include the origins of old-age security programs in 1889 Imperial Germany under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the signing of the U.S. Social Security Act under President Franklin D. Roosevelt on August 14, 1935, and the program's financial instability caused by the Baby Boomer generation's collection of Social Security benefits.