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The Unlikely Journalist Who Dethroned America’s Robber Barons

We May Revere Our Millionaires, but Thanks to Ida Tarbell, We’re Not Afraid to Expose Their Shenanigans

By Steve Weinberg
February 16, 2016

Over the last few years, the idea of “the one percent” has become a popular way to discuss the gap between the fantastically wealthy—the one percent of Americans who control more than 20 percent of the country’s wealth—and the rest of us. But the one percent is not a new phenomenon. Back in 1900, they were known as the Robber Barons—people like Andrew Carnegie and Philip Armour, who were riding new industries and monopolies to ever greater fortunes. At the …

Let’s Not Play ‘Gotcha’ With the Great Emancipator

If Lincoln Seems Like a Lukewarm Abolitionist, It’s Because He Was a Nuanced Radical

By Allen C. Guelzo
February 12, 2016

“I am naturally anti slavery,” Abraham Lincoln said in 1864. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.” That doesn’t come as too much of a surprise, considering that every American is taught in school that Lincoln was the president who freed the slaves.

Yet, there has always been a small cloud of doubt about just how great an emancipator he really was. Why (for instance) did he wait …

When Human Hair Could Braid Two Hearts Together

Before Chocolates Reigned on Valentine’s Day, a Tuft of Your Beloved’s Tresses Was the Most Fashionable Sign of Affection

By Helen Sheumaker
February 8, 2016

In 2016, Americans will spend more than $18 billion on Valentine’s Day, according to the National Retail Federation. We’ll show our love and affection by buying heart-shaped chocolate boxes, sparkling wine, flowers, cards, and jewelry. Nowhere on the list is hair.

Imagine getting a keepsake made of hair from someone’s head! It would seem morbid. But through the 1800s, Americans showed their feelings with hair. At home, hair was sewn into notebooks, put under glass in lockets, and sent through …

The Japanese-American Officer Who Helped Take Down and Then Rebuild Japan

Born in Seattle in 1920, Harry Fukuhara Was Fully Bicultural, Bilingual, and Binational

By Pamela Rotner Sakamoto
January 28, 2016

When I first met Harry Fukuhara, in 1994, he was orchestrating a Tokyo press conference for Japanese Foreign Ministry officials, former Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, and veterans of the Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team. The groups were there to commemorate the separate threads connecting them to the Holocaust. The Foreign Ministry officials were belatedly acknowledging a renegade consul, Chiune Sugihara, who had issued approximately two thousand transit visas to desperate Jewish refugees in Kaunas, Lithuania, when he was stationed …

Running for President Takes a Stiff—and Clean-Shaven—Upper Lip

As Thomas Dewey Learned in His Race Against Harry Truman, You Can Lose by a Whisker

By Christopher Oldstone-Moore
January 26, 2016

In 1948, Emilie Spencer Deer, a solidly Republican woman from Ohio, announced to her family that she would vote for President Truman instead of the Republican candidate Thomas Dewey because she could not vote for a man with a mustache. She was neither foolish nor alone in her opinion. Educated and conscientious, she was, like other women of her day, simply reading the signs of what a good man looked like at the time. A clean-shaven man was team player, …

Let Me Take You to Kailua Beach

Corbett Kalama of the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation Will Get on the Dance Floor if a Good Song is Playing

January 22, 2016

Corbett Kalama, who was born in Honolulu, is the vice president of real estate investments and community affairs with the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation. He recently retired as an executive vice president from First Hawaiian Bank, where he was responsible for the Oahu region. Before participating in a discussion on what Hawaii can teach America about race, Kalama talked about naming a boat after his mother, his greatest extravagance, and the ugliest tie he owns.

Q: What is the last …

When Two ‘Little Rascals’ Crossed the Color Line

The Friendship Between These Young Hollywood Actors—One Black, One White—Was Ahead of Its Time, but Also an Illusion

By Julia Lee
January 19, 2016

When I was a kid, I used to watch episodes of The Little Rascals on TV in our living room in Los Angeles. My parents were Korean immigrants who had moved to the city in the 1970s, the first in a wave of Korean immigrants who would transform the city’s racial makeup. I had no idea the series had been filmed 50 years earlier, that most of the stars were dead, and that it was once unusual for black and …

The Japanese-American Flower Growers Who Made Phoenix Bloom

Post-WWII Gardens Like My Family’s Found Beauty in Stony Ground

By Kathy Nakagawa
January 14, 2016

When my high school orchestra teacher found out my family owned a Japanese flower garden in Phoenix, Arizona, he made a confession: He had once snuck into those fields. He stole flowers to propose to his wife. To this day, I meet other people who share with me equally vivid memories of the farms. One friend told me: “I would drive my mom there every weekend!” Although all of the flower fields are gone now, they’re still an important part …

What the First First Couple Bequeathed America

George and Martha Washington’s Close Partnership Helped Them Through Rebellion, War, and Even the Presidency

By Flora Fraser
January 12, 2016

One of the most revealing spaces at Mount Vernon, George and Martha Washington’s home in Virginia, is a bare attic bedroom. Martha retreated here after George’s death in 1799. Without him, she would not occupy the elegant bedchamber they had so long shared. Grief made this tough, capable woman give up her will to live. She died, still in that attic retreat, a few years later.

Standing at the threshold of that little room, 10 years ago, I wondered at the …

How to Drink Like a Gangster

Four Cocktails to Die for, Courtesy of America’s Underworld

By Scott M. Deitche
January 8, 2016

For his brief reign atop the Gambino crime family, in the late 1980s, John Gotti, the “Teflon Don,” was the heir apparent to Al Capone as America’s top mob boss. Gotti was as extravagant as he was charismatic, with a larger-than-life persona that extended to his taste for the finer things, including drink. As gifts, he liked to give his loyal underlings bottles of Rémy Martin Louis XIII Cognac, which can run in the thousands.

After Gotti was sentenced to …

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