AmericanHeritage.com’s Holiday Gift Guide

An assortment of our recommended gifts.

If holiday shopping makes you a little anxious, fret no more. We’ve gathered the most interesting and thought-provoking new DVDs, books, and CDs we could find, all selected to please the history lovers on your list. These gifts preserve the past in sight and sound—offering old radio shows, family photo albums, footage from great music festivals, and much more. They will bring back memories of everything from pop-culture kitsch to bygone city life.

These five DVDs give glimpses into the past via both fact and fiction. Four of them revisit old favorites—including concert footage of the young Bob Dylan and the familiar pleasures of Leave It to Beaver. One unearths rarely encountered history in the form of a vast trove of obscure short movies.

Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film, 1894-1941 (Image Entertainment, list price $99.99). A film buff’s dream, this set of seven DVDs includes 155 hard-to-find shorts from the early days of the medium, including some of Joseph Cornell’s legendary collage films and experimental works by Walker Evans, Orson Welles, and many others.

King Kong (Collectors Edition) (Warner Home Video, $39.98). This is the 1933 movie that invented modern special effects. A new collector’s edition presents a digitally remastered print, showing Fay Wray and her hairy tormentor in all their glory. The glossy packaging includes reproductions of posters and programs from when the movie was new.

Leave It To Beaver: The Complete First Season Limited Edition Gift Set (Universal Studios, $69.98). The show that defined “nuclear family” for the baby-boomer generation. All 39 episodes from the initial season, 1957 are out on DVD, in a lunchbox with a Cleaver family photo album also packed in.

WWII 60th Anniversary Collection, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 (Columbia Tristar Home Video, each set $39.95). Six classic films and two documentaries make up these two boxes. One includes The Bridge on the River Kwai, From Here to Eternity, and The Guns of Navarone; the other Das Boot, The Caine Mutiny, and Anzio.

Bob Dylan: No Direction Home (Paramount Home Video, $29,99). Directed by Martin Scorsese, this engrossing new three-hour documentary includes footage from many rare early concert films and was made with the cooperation of Dylan himself, who comments onscreen, looking back across 40 years.

The best photographs are more than just factual recordings of history. Rather they capture the mood of both photographer and subject—even when the subject is something as elusive as a place and an era. The four books of photography here show various sides of the United States in the twentieth century, all different and all true. We also include a lavish volume of comics that compiles the work of many masters, from beautifully reproduced strips from Little Nemo to subversive recent comics and extracts from graphic novels.

Real Photo Postcards: Unbelievable Images from the Collection of Harvey Tulcensky (Princeton Architectural Press, paperback, $19.95). A wealth of fascinating early-twentieth-century postcards, including family portraits, trick photos, joke photos, and more, all the photographs shot by amateurs during a make-your-own-postcard craze.

Looking at Los Angeles (Metropolis Books, $85). Drawn from the collection of Ben Stiller, the actor, this oversize volume of many photos by numerous photographers shows the myriad moods of the city from the 1930s to the present.

Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939-1943 (Harry N. Abrams, $35). Kodachrome photographs commissioned by the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information reveal life during the Depression, all across the country, in unexpected full color.

Stanley Kubrick: Drama & Shadows (Phaidon Press, $69.95). Before he became a motion-picture director, Kubrick was a staff photographer for Look magazine. This sumptuous compilation of photos taken in New York City and other places was shot over a period of five years in the 1940s starting when he was only 17.

Masters of American Comics (Yale University Press, $45). The art of Charles M. Schultz, R. Crumb, Chris Ware, and many more is showcased in a lavish volume, accompanied by essays by the likes of Jules Feiffer and Jonathan Safran Foer.

Three of these CD sets preserve long-lost voices from the past, bringing together forgotten tunes and stories from radio. The others offer walking tours that also serve as oral histories of our rapidly changing times. Some of the radio recordings (Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast) are legendary; others (public-service announcements from the 1950s) are souvenirs of the everyday.

The Greatest Old-Time Radio Shows of the 20th Century (Radio Spirits, $69.98). Selected by Walter Cronkite, this 20-CD, 20-hour collection includes everything from Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds to Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, Superman, and Grand Central Station.

Atomic Platters: Cold War Music from the Golden Age of Homeland Security (Bear Family, $195.49). More than a hundred recordings made between 1945 and 1969 are gathered on an imported five-disc set. Obscure Cold War songs, spanning pop, rock, R&B, and country (Hank Williams’s “No, No Joe,” about Joseph Stalin, is among them), are complemented by scary public-service announcements from the era. Plus a bonus DVD and a 292-page book.

One Kiss Can Lead to Another: Girl Group Sounds Lost and Found (Rhino, $69.98). Four discs of harmonizing girl-group pop songs, mostly from forgotten threesomes and foursomes (“Needle in a Haystack,” by the Velvelettes, “I’d Much Rather Be With the Girls,” by Donna Lynn). Favorite voices from the sixties, including the Shirelles and Lesley Gore, show up as well, singing lesser-known tunes.

Walking tours: Available in either CD or MP3 format, these recordings allow the listener to explore two of America’s oldest cities at his or her own pace. Soundwalk (www.soundwalk.com, each $19.95) offers a chance to learn about different New York City neighborhoods, including Chinatown and the Hasidic neighborhood of Williamsburg, each on its own CD, and with each tour narrated by a local and incorporating site-specific sounds as well as pointing to small neighborhood flourishes you might otherwise ignore. The Boston Audissey (www.audisseyguides.com, $19.95) gives only one tour, but it covers a great deal of the city and features the voices of many native Bostonians, including an FBI agent and a ska-band member.

A number of contributors to American Heritage magazine and AmericanHeritage.com have recently published books. Be sure to check out:

The Last Coach: A Life of Paul “Bear” Bryant (W. W. Norton, $26.95). Allen Barra tells the story behind the man who made the Crimson Tide into a powerhouse. (Warren St. John’s Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer (Three Rivers Press, $12.95), a funny insider look into the world of ‘Bama fans, now out in paper, makes a nice companion volume.)

1776 (Simon & Schuster, $32). Following George Washington and his troops through the first year of the American Revolution, David McCullough covers crucial history from the first fight in Boston to the incredible, cause-saving victories at Trenton and Princeton 12 very hard months later.

The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank (Norton, $23.95). Ellen Feldman’s novel imagines what would have happened if Peter van Pels, the teenage boy who hid in the attic in Amsterdam with Anne Frank, had survived the war, emigrated to America, and tried to start a new life with a new identity in the New World.

The following three books all began as articles in the magazine: Race of the Century: The Heroic True Story of the 1908 New York to Paris Auto Race, by Julie M. Fenster (Crown, $25); Mysteries of My Father: An Irish-American Memoir, by Thomas Fleming (Wiley, $24.95); and The Magician and the Cardsharp: The Search for America’s Greatest Sleight-of-Hand Artist, by Karl Johnson (Henry Holt, $26).

—Claire Lui is an editorial assistant at American Heritage magazine.