August 1956

How a statesman’s strange letter settled a court fight over a will

— until the shooting started

His career at Princeton prepared him for a larger role, but also showed his strange blend of strength and weakness

Janus Addison Reavis got rich—for a time, anyway—on his Peralta land fraud. But in the end he went to jail .

Aspirants for the White House begin humbly and rise fast in the typical campaign biography

In the mid-Ninteenth Century, enormous herds roamed the western plains. In a few years only scattered remnants of these survived.

If Buchanan had met the Kansas problem firmly we might have avoided civil war
The fourth in a series on TIMES OF TRIAL IN AMERICAN STATECRAFT

Salmon P. Chase’s beautiful daughter stopped at nothing, eevenn at marrying a rich scoundrel, in her zeal to make her father President

A portfolio of paintings of American birds from the brush of a great Connecticut artist and naturalist

On the same day that Chicago burned, the Wisconsin woods went up in flames. Peshtigo’s fire missed the headlines hut killed five times as many people.

False cures and adulterated foodstuffs were flooding the market when a chemist and his “poison squad” pushed through the first Pure Food and Drugs Law

Excerpts from Land of Giants

Resigning his commission, the military hero joined Congress in acting out a strict protocol to symbolize the supremacy of civil government