October/November 1980

When Winifred Smith Rieber confidently agreed to paint a group portrait of America’s five pre-eminent philosophers, she had no idea it would be all but impossible even to get them to stay in the same room with one another.

One of Ruth Snyder’s Crimes Was Murder

The saga of Kip Wagner, the first modern American to grow rich from ancient Spanish treasure

Declaring himself a “thorough democrat” George Caleb Bingham portrayed the American voter with an artist’s eye—and a seasoned politicians savvy

Memories of Fresno

An exasperated Ralph Waldo Emerson said of his rudest, most rebellious—and most brilliant—protégé. Their turbulent relationship survived what one newspaper called “the grossest violation of literary comity and courtesy that ever passed under our notice.”

Arkansas saves fragments of the rich but distant past.

A black chaplain in the Union Army reports on the struggle to take Fort Fisher, North Carolina, in the winter of 1864–65

Sixty-eight years before Mount St. Helens blew, Alaska’s Mount Katmai erupted—and nearly brought on a second ice age

The Ubiquitous Signs and Symbols of American Freemasonry

In founding Groton, Endicott Peabody was sure that muscular Christianity would protect
boys from the perils of loaferism