Tour D'horizon: June 2026

With the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence tomorrow and temperatures hitting 100°, it is a holiday weekend heatwave here in NYC. As I have a two-year-old, we will be mostly staying inside or playing with the hose in our yard, but my Brooklyn neighbourhood was already popping off fireworks all last night so the festivities will likely come to us.

Considering my long-running interest in the Bicentennial, I am interested in contrasting the experiences and commercialism surrounding 1976 and today, so I thought I would share with you some photos from the various celebrations that took over New York City around July 4th, 1976, from “Operation Sail” where more than 200 tall ships promenaded up the Hudson River to various parades showing off the multicultural, melting pot of America. All of these photos are by Nick DeWolf, from the miraculous, huge archive of his images uploaded to Flickr.

Also this month I was interviewed by the Costume Society of America for its “Dialogues on Dress” series.

Below are some of the things that fascinated and intrigued me this month:

If you are looking to read some fascinating history this holiday weekend, pick up a copy of Chloe Chapin’s Suitable: the Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men (Oxford University Press, 2026). You can read my interview with her first to get a sense of why the history of how men started all wearing dark suits is so important and how much those suits have had an impact on all of us.

Through another newsletter, I found this PDF of a 1956 essay by famed conservationist Rachel Carson where she lays out a way of interacting with the natural world as an adult that helps your child to feel emotions, particularly wonder and awe. Even if you don’t have any children you spend time with, I think it’s a pretty good plan for anyone to follow to recapture wonder and sensory experiencing.

I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is nor half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil. Once the emotions have been aroused—a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love—then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning. It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate.

73 Trip West — In 1973, Larry Racioppo set out from Brooklyn to California, armed with a medium format camera. For the first time in over half a century, roadside photographs from his trip have been unearthed.