Putting the Bayou Back in Bayou City
The city of Houston was founded on Buffalo Bayou, which runs from the surrounding prairie through downtown to the port lands. A 158-acre park hugging its banks has long been Read more…
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Saving America’s Mustangs
Wild horses, or mustangs, have roamed free in the American West since the days of the Spanish conquistadors. Because they have almost no natural predators today, they multiply rapidly and Read more…
Garden in a Quarry
Andrew Hodges developed oil and gas fields in Louisiana, then became interested in the cutover timberlands of northwest Louisiana, from which all the virgin longleaf pine trees had been harvested, Read more…
Transforming Parks in Memphis, Atlanta, and Beyond
Shelby Farms is a huge oasis (4,500 acres, or five times the size of Central Park in New York) inside Tennessee’s largest city. For most of its life it has Read more…
Trust for the National Mall
After opening his commercial real estate firm in the nation’s capital in 1974, John “Chip” Akridge developed more than 11 million square feet of office space. Disturbed by the increasingly Read more…
Sanford Underground Research Facility
The Homestake gold mine extends a mile underground in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Its deep shafts had previously been used by physics professors for scientific experiments, and when Read more…
A Noah’s Ark in the Sunshine State
Brad Kelley—a college dropout whose discount cigarette empire made him a billionaire—brews his own bourbon, never uses e-mail, sometimes wears a kilt, and owns more land than there are acres Read more…
Acres Across America
In an example of what is called “cooperative conservation,” Walmart made a ten-year, $35 million commitment, in partnership with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, to conserve at least one Read more…
World’s Largest Aquarium
Not surprisingly for the man who brought the big-box store to the hardware business, when Bernie Marcus decided that Atlanta needed an aquarium, he wanted it to be large. And Read more…
Maine North Woods
In the mid-1970s, Roxanne Quimby relocated to rural Maine to live close to the earth, without electricity or running water. A decade later, she partnered with beekeeper Burt Shavitz and Read more…
Discovery of Insulin
Though diabetes is one of the most common modern diseases, there was for generations no hope of recovering from it. One merely adopted a radically constricted diet. Or bodily decay Read more…
George Eastman Popularizes Preventive Dental Care
By the time his company Eastman Kodak became a secure juggernaut in the early 1900s, George Eastman was one of the richest men in the world, but he had lost Read more…
Henry Ford Hospital
Henry Ford stood at the center of the manufacturing revolution after he established the Ford Motor Company in 1903. People flooded to Detroit in search of employment, and the swelling Read more…
Social Hygiene Movement
John Rockefeller Jr. poured himself into the philanthropic activities begun by his father, and is responsible for the creation or development of several signature Rockefeller organizations. These include the Rockefeller Read more…
American Cancer Society
In the beginning of the twentieth century, a cancer diagnosis almost certainly meant death. Cancer was such a mortifying subject that doctors sometimes even kept confirmed diagnoses from their patients, Read more…
Rockefeller’s Medical Philanthropy Sprouts 61 Nobel Prizes
John Rockefeller, the son of an itinerant seller of folk medicines, started pouring large sums from his Standard Oil fortune into medical research and treatment long before he founded the Read more…
Modern American Medical Education
Andrew Carnegie did not have a strong personal interest in medicine. He believed in the power of education to promote wealth and well-being in society, though, so when the American Read more…
Eliminating Hookworm in the U.S.
When John Rockefeller announced that he intended to eliminate hookworm disease in the American South, it was an unheard of notion. Indeed, some of the intended beneficiaries were embarrassed and Read more…
A Mass Crusade Against Tuberculosis
In the first decade of the twentieth century, tuberculosis accounted for about 11 percent of all U.S. deaths. About a quarter of all children were afflicted in cities like New Read more…
Peking Union Medical College
The Peking Union Medical College was founded in 1906 by American and British missionary groups. It was a rare outpost of modern medicine in a nation with one of the Read more…