Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Theodore Roosevelt
AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID McCULLOUGH
Few men—foreign or native born—have ever understood us better than this infinitely curious, inveterate Visitor from England
When James Bryce presented his credentials as ambassador from Great Britain to President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907, he probably knew more about the nation to which he had been sent than any foreign envoy in Washington before or since.
To Owen Wister, the unlikely inventor of the cowboy legend, the trail rider was a survivor from the Middle Ages – “the last cavalier,” savior of the Anglo-Saxon race
When Theodore Roosevelt—Harvard-educated, dandified, and just twenty-three—arrived in Albany as an assemblyman in 1882, the oldpols dismissed him as a “Punkin-Lily,”and worse. They were in for a shock.
“Viewed purely in the abstract, I think there can be no question that women should have equal rights with men …I would have the word ‘obey’ used no more by the wife than by the husband.”
”I first saw her on October 18, 1878, and loved her as soon as I saw her sweet, fair young face.
The granite was tough—but so was Gutzon Borglum
In late August, 1970, a band of Sioux Indians entered the sacred precincts of a National Memorial in South Dakota and bivouacked on a mountaintop there for several weeks.
The leak was known of old. It can afflict either a ship or a government, it invariably means that something invisible has gone wrong, and in certain cases it ends in disaster.
In October, 1975, a carful of teenagers came cruising down a Hartford, Connecticut, street and rammed into a limousine carrying President Gerald R. Ford.
Vain, snobbish, distinctly upper-class in his libertine social habits, Gouverneur Morris nevertheless saw himself justifiably as "A Representative of America"
Of all the remarkable men who forgathered in Philadelphia in the spring of 1787 to revise the Articles of Confederation, and perhaps to do even more, Gouverneur Morris was certainly the most talkative.
The United States remained officially neutral, but many Americans fought alongside both opposing armies and several became legendary heroes
“I have been absorbed in interest in the Boer War,” wrote Theodore Roosevelt to his friend Cecil Spring Rice in 1899. He was not alone. Most Americans took a keen interest in this remote conflict.
Gene Debs was America’s leading socialist, but just about everyone agreed he had
In the decades before the First World War he was the most dynamic, persuasive, and at the same time the most lovable figure that American Socialism had produced. He hated capitalism but could hate no man.
Americans used to take their dinners seriously. The preposterous social arbiter Ward McAllister proclaimed in 1890 that “a dinner invitation, once accepted, is a sacred obligation.
It’S rough to be around a rider when he’s the President
In little more than seven weeks the Rough Rider would be leaving the White House.
The dignified portrait, opposite, of Bear’s Belly, an Arikara Indian warrior of the eastern plains, wrapped in a bearskin, the symbol of his personal medicine—and the photographs of the other native Americans on the following pages—are a sampling of a wondrou
Thus Boss Richard Croker breezily dismissed charges of corruption. But the fortune he made from “honest graft” was not enough to buy him what he most wanted
The most glamorous and the most powerful of the Tammany bosses who ran New York City for much of the century between Boss Tweed and Carmine DeSapio was Richard Croker.
A FAMOUS HISTORIAN RECALLS THE COUNTRY WHERE HE GREW UP
We lived in Indian summer and mistook it for spring. Winter lay ahead just when we thought June was on the way. The school, the town, and the people connected with both were coming to an end that seemed to be a beginning.
In a society grown steadily more affluent over two centuries, the existence of the poor has raised some baffling questions and surprising answers
From the opening decades of the nineteenthcentury toourownday, Americans’ persistent efforts to understand the causes and conditions of poverty have fixed upon the word “paradox.” Writing in 1822, the managers of one early reform organization, the Society for the Prevention of
“She is such a funny child, so old-fashioned, that we always call her ‘Granny’ “her mother said. Cousin Franklin felt otherwise
By no strange quirk of fate, no unlikely chance or mysterious destiny, were Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt brought together in casual acquaintanceship.
The Big Ditch had so far been a colossal flop, and Teddy Roosevelt desperately needed an engineering genius who could take over the job and “make the dirt fly.” The answer was not the famous Goethals, but a man whom history has forgotten.
The Panama Canal was the biggest, most costly thing Americans had ever attempted beyond their borders, as was plain to everyone in the summer of 1905, and particularly to the man most responsible for the project, Theodore Roosevelt.
on the Writing of History
Few of our thirty-seven Presidents have been highly gifted with literary talent; of those few, fewer had the time or the patience to sit down and deliberately write books.
The Rough Rider rode roughshod over writers who took liberties with Mother Nature’s children
It was an early spring evening in 1907. Theodore Roosevelt and Edward B.
“Almost every time a serious disarmament effort got under way, it barely managed to move forward an inch or two before a great world cataclysm intervened”
As spring moved northward over Europe in 1970, a familiar scene was enacted in Vienna, a city where diplomacy is as much a part of the civic tradition as steelmaking in Pittsburgh.
He had vivid memories of fighting in Cuba with Theodore Roosevelt. “We’d have gone to hell with him.”
“In strict confidence, I should welcome any w
Teddy Roosevelt once said, “I can either run the country or control Alice, not both.”
This article is the first in a new series that will appear frequently in AMERICAN HERITAGE. "Before the Colors Fade" is the title of a recent biography of General George S. Patton, Jr. and is used with the kind permission of the author, Fred Ayer, Jr., and the publisher, Houghton Mifflin.
The American system of choosing a President has not worked out badly, far as it may be from the Founding Fathers’ vision of a natural aristocracy
You entered it only rarely, and you weren’t meant to be comfortable there. But every house had to have one, no matter how high the cost
In the era of the Bull Moose, Progressivism became a party; the man behind Roosevelt was, of all things, a Morgan partner
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