Several years ago, driving down the Atlantic coast to Georgia, I looked out my window to find that I was being paced by a woman on a quad. I must have done a double-take, like the Navy pilot who sees ...

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... The historian who revisits well-trodden ground must offer either something new or at least a new way of looking at it. In “American Fun” John Beckman does ...

The historian who revisits well-trodden ground must offer either something new or at least a new way of looking at it. In “American Fun,” John Beckman does both — stringing unfamiliar episodes of ...

To construct the history of an elusive subject is a tough task. It's all the more challenging when the topic isn't concrete, like a war or a life, but a theme, abstract, without obvious borders but ...

Beckman, an English professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, traces the “three tributaries of American fun—the commercial, playful, and radically political,” from Thomas Morton’s anarchic Merry Mount ...

You’ve heard the story of the Englishman who sailed to North America in the 1620s in search of a new way of life. He looked back on the fraught religious environment of England and swore that on this ...

The historian who revisits well-trodden ground must offer either something new or at least a new way of looking at it. In “American Fun” John Beckman does both — stringing unfamiliar episodes of U.S.