The American Menu

New York City,  1895  Russian-born painter Wassily Kandinsky is credited with creating the first abstract painting, perhaps as early a...

  New Bedford & Honolulu,  1875  For those of us who live on the Mainland, the words “king,” “palatial residence,” and “Hawaii” ar...

Philadelphia  On Christmas Day in 1864, a special dinner was served to the 4,500 Union soldiers housed at Satterlee General Hospital, t...

Havana,  ca. 1955  During a recent visit to Havana, I hailed a taxi (a 1958 Ford) and rumbled over to the Plaza de Armas to look for s...

Los Angeles,  1938 On a foggy morning in July 1938, a 31-year-old aircraft mechanic named Douglass Corrigan took off in a jerry-built...

Thanksgiving,  1852  Thanksgiving was once regarded as “a Yankee holiday.” In the eighteenth century, the clergy in New England used i...

Washington, D.C. 1846  President James K. Polk was the last of the Jacksonians to sit in the White House. Nicknamed “Little Hickory,” ...

New York City 1880  In the preface of his 1894 cookbook The Epicurean , Delmonico’s chef Charles Ranhofer cited seventeen grand banque...

Topeka, Kansas 1883  Ephemera often contains unwitting historical evidence. A case in point is provided by a small menu from the Copelan...

Beverly Hills,  1948  Sitting Pretty (1948) With his attitude of thinly-veiled disdain, actor Clifton Webb was “a blast of asexual s...