They say a tree is best measured when it is down. Allan Nevins is gone, at last, although he seemed imperishable, and we at AMERICAN HERITAGE feel a poignant sense of loss. We measure him now by the length of the shadow he cast, and by the abiding influence he had upon us and upon the magazine we serve. We also think of the friendship which he extended to everyone who knew him, and that is immeasurable.

A good many different men had a part in the founding of this magazine, but it seems safe to say that it would not exist in its present form but for the influence of Allan Nevins. Nevins was one of the great American historians, and perhaps he was greatest of all in this: he wrote history, not simply as a means of talking with other historians, but in order to talk to the general reader. He was in the grand tradition of Francis Parkman and William H. Prescott, which is to say that he was a skilled literary craftsman; and he was firmly convinced that history, written down and put between covers, has to be much more than a collection of Ph.D. theses. It has to give its reader a sense of the drama, the subtle excitement, and the immediacy of the events in his nation’s past. If it cannot give this, it fails; if it does give it, it enriches the life and broadens the horizon of the person who reads it.

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