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From the Archive

All the Nothing

Maggie had nothing in the world but Mike and the twins and the other two little boys, none of whom could be considered anything of an asset. Mike had landed…

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El Corralón

Bayview, Texas, the Immigration and Naturalization Service Processing Center. The camp lies well to the north of the Rio Grande, covering 317 acres of the flatlands beside the Gulf of…

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Shadow Dancing

Infinity is a disco in Lower Manhattan. It is 3 a.m. on Friday, the dead of night, but the evening is not yet half over and there are still two…

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Into the Woods

The idea for the Civilian Conservation Corps sprang into action almost overnight, in March 1933, during the magnificent ferment of the first hundred days of Roosevelt’s New Deal. It became…

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Literary Failure

There used to be the notion that Keats was killed by a bad review, that in despair and hopelessness he turned his back to the wall and gave up the…

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The Real Jimmy Carter

At 4:30 in the afternoon in the Admiral Benbow Inn in Jackson, Mississippi, Jimmy Carter sits opposite a dozen seventeen-year-olds, asking them to help him become president. “I grow peanuts…

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Russia and Red China

For the past six years the largest country in the world—with a quarter of the earth’s population—has been a blank space on the map of American foreign policy. For many…

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Unyielding Ice

On the sixteenth of July, 1905, the steamer Roosevelt left New York Harbor for her northern voyage. Her course from the anchorage was noisy with the friendly greetings of every…

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Black Lives Televised

I can remember as a child sitting upstairs in my bedroom and hearing my mother shout at the top of her voice that someone “colored . . . colored!” was on the…

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Jet-Age Federalism

Most of the time, Americans seem to thrive on change. The meadow converted to a real-estate development is regarded less as a sacrifice to progress than a symbol of it.…

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Living Animals

We shall not understand what a book is, and why a book has the value many persons have, and is even less replaceable than a person, if we forget how…

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Workingmen’s Machine

Within the next few years, the Congress of Industrial Organizations Political Action Committee may become the most powerful vote-herding and lobbying organization in the country. It now has prestige, cohesive…

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Strike Team

The first thing we did was build a bridge over Slough Creek, a pristine trout stream in the northern reaches of Yellowstone National Park. I felt strange—digging and hammering in…

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Unreconstructed

Mrs. Goode was a little toad of a woman, dark and fleshy-featured. If my mother had seen her, she would have said she looked like she had a “touch of…

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Good Morning, Texas

Before dawn I woke, shivering with cold. I had never been so cold in my life. While it was still dark, the bugle sounded reveille. We dressed as close to…

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An Ordinary Man

He stayed drunk the first week. He paced up and down the apartment howling, and Mrs. Voltaire hid behind the stove. After a week he went back to the office…

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Flowers of Evil

Last season was a strange one in my garden, notable not only for the unseasonably cool and wet weather — the talk of gardeners all over New England — but…

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American Women

I am an American woman but I had no opportunity until a few years ago to know women in America. Living as I did in China, it is true that…

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Modern Despots

In a democratic state any propagandist will have rivals competing with him for the support of the public. In totalitarian states there is no liberty of expression for writers and…

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The Castro

It was no coincidence that homosexuals migrated to San Francisco in the Seventies, for the city was famed as a playful place, more Catholic than Protestant in its eschatological intuition.…

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Terms of Surrender

It was in the fall of 1941 that the question of atomic energy was first brought directly to my attention. At that time President Roosevelt appointed a committee to advise…

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Two and Two

Among the folk invited to Tony’s wedding were the Hardcomes o’ Climmerston — Stephen and James — first cousins, both of them small farmers. With them were their intended wives,…

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Political Wilderness

Lately it seems that politicians have made increasing use of the phrase “home rule.” The rash of rhetoric, which includes President Nixon’s reorganization plan to move government closer to the…

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School Survival Guide

During the depressed years of the Thirties a good many private schools went out of business. Others cut their faculty salaries back to levels which confirmed teachers in their suspicion…

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Delight

From “Verse,” which appeared in the December 1973 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete selection of poems — along with the magazine’s entire 167-year archive — is available online.

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The Maze

On coming to America I had the same hopes as have most European immigrants and the same disillusionment, though the latter affected me more keenly and more deeply. The immigrant without…

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Southern Harm

We are faced with two apparently irreconcilable facts in the South: the one being the decree of our national government that there be absolute equality in education among all citizens,…

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Paper Pushers

studs terkel: Your name is known to quite a few Americans these days. You let the country and the world know about a series of documents called the Pentagon Papers.…

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October 2019

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