Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
Features
The author took part in the first night combat with Japanese bombers. In that dramatic action, he witnessed the loss of Butch O'Hare, the famous World War II ace for whom O’Hare Airport was named.
By 1943, the war was moving fast—new carriers, new airplane squadrons—and in November our air group, commanded by Lt. Comdr. Edward “Butch” O’Hare, was loaded aboard ship for the Pacific Theater.
Alexander Graham Bell traveled to Italy at the turn of the 20th century on an audacious mission to rescue the remains of the man whose legacy endowed the Smithsonian Institution.
Alexander Graham Bell did not spend the Christmas season of 1903 in the festive tradition. On the contrary, the inventor of the telephone passed the holiday engaged in a ghoulish Italian adventure involving a graveyard, old bones, and the opening of a moldy casket.
A largely accidental battle, pitting Robert E. Lee against George B. McClellan, became the single deadliest day in America's history and changed the course of the Civil War.
The day of Antietam—September 17, 1862 — was like no other day of the Civil War. “The roar of the infantry was beyond anything conceivable to the uninitiated,” wrote a Union officer who fought there.
In Florida during the 1830s, a young Indian warrior led a bold and bloody campaign against the government's plan to relocate his people west of the Mississippi River.
Born Billy Powel in
Seventy-five years ago, the "first lady of the air" vanished over the Pacific Ocean while attempting to circumnavigate the globe. Today, there may be renewed hope of solving the mystery.
At 9:00 on the morning of Tuesday March 20, 2012, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton stepped to a
podium in the State Department’s Benjamin Franklin Dining Room and addressed a roomful of reporters, federal officials, and a sprinkling of female military aviators.
The noted writer and educator tells of his boyhood in the West Virginia town of Piedmont, where African Americans were second-class citizens, but family pride ran deep.
The author, who once served under General Patton and whose father, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was Patton's commanding officer, shares his memories of "Ol' Blood and Guts."
The 1807 prosecution of Aaron Burr for treason was a highly flawed and failed endeavor.
In late March of 1807, Aaron Burr arrived in Richmond, Virginia, in a vile mood, filthy, and stinking. He had just endured a month of hard travel under heavy guard through the dense forests of the Southeast.
Reflections on the superb historian and American Heritage editor
For decades, Yale history professor David Blight, an award-winning author and a preeminent scholar of the Civil War, has studied the legacy of Bruce Catton, the historian/writer who significantly shaped our understanding of the Civil War by bringing it into exhilarating, memorable relief thro
CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite underwent a dramatic change of heart during the Vietnam War—and in doing so, changed the face of broadcast journalism.
On February 6, 1965, Vietcong guerrillas attacked the U.S. base at Pleiku, killing eight American soldiers and wounding 126. The Johnson administration quickly retaliated, commencing another vicious cycle of lightning reprisals and military escalations. Suddenly U.S.
New England industrialists hired thousands of young farm girls to work together in early textile mills—and spawned a host of unintended consequences.
In June 1833, President Andrew Jackson, visiting the brand-new factory town of Lowell, Massachusetts, watched as 2500 female mill workers marched past the balcony of his hotel.
Debate over America's involvement in World War II came to a head in July 1941 as the Senate argued over a draft-extension bill. The decision would have profound consequences for the nation.
On July 19, 1941, when General George Catlett Marshall, the Army chief of staff, stepped before the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, his gray civilian suit could not disguise the proud bearing of a soldier and commander of men.
A new look at a famous Revolutionary figure questions whether history’s long-standing judgment is accurate.
AT 9 O’CLOCK ON THE morning of September 25, 1775, a French Canadian habitant banged on the main gate of Montreal. The Americans were coming, he blurted breathlessly to a British officer.
Restoration experts make a startling discovery that an 1848 daguerreotype hides a wealth of insight into life in a pre-war riverside town.
In 2006, conservator Ralph Wiegandt flipped on his Zeiss Axio stereomicroscope and peered at the surface of an 1848 daguerreotype.
Restoration experts make a startling discovery that an 1848 daguerreotype hides a wealth of insight into life in a pre-war riverside town.
In 2006, conservator Ralph Wiegandt flipped on his Zeiss Axio stereomicroscope and peered at the surface of an 1848 daguerreotype.
The business of forging George Washington’s signature and correspondence to sell to unwitting buyers goes back 150 years.
As the editor of the papers of George Washington at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, I have the privilege of meeting with many people who come bearing documents supposedly signed by the first president.
American artist Augustus Saint-Gaudens finds inspiration in France to create one of America’s most iconic sculptures, a memorial to the Civil War hero Admiral David Farragut.
To bring their nation to the leading edge of technology, Soviet leaders are turning to the United States. Their grandfathers did the same thing.
Our usual picture of the Soviet Union and its history is strictly political and economic. We trace the many struggles for leadership power and the ups and downs of the Soviet economy.
In 1817, “Old Pewt’s” rebellious cadets met their master in Sylvanus Thayer
It was June 15, 1817, and up at West Point newly elected President James Monroe, staunch friend of the Military Academy, was in a towering rage. The place was in poor shape, its curriculum had unraveled, examinations were unknown, and discipline was non-existent. The acting superintendent, Captain Alden Partridge, Corps of Engineers, seemed to be running a “Dotheboys Hall” of sorts, where favoritism governed and cadets were being graduated without reference either to academic standing or military ability.
From law officer to murderer to Hollywood consultant: the strange career of a man who became myth
Late in his life, Henry Fonda, at dinner with a producer named Melvin Shestack, recalled meeting an old man who said he had firsthand knowledge of a memorable Fonda character, Wyatt Earp, the legendary frontier lawman of John Ford’s classic My Darli
Bela Lugosi began by playing Laertes and Romeo, only to become forever trapped in very different roles.
My mother loved parades and early on imbued me with a love of same. An incident at one sticks in my mind. I believe it was in 1926 or 1927. I can’t be sure as I was only a small boy then.
A vast tribute in cloth to the victors of D-day is good art, good history—and surprisingly affecting
In the ancient seafaring town of Portsmouth, England, overlooking the English Channel, stands the D-Day Museum.
Did the Indians have a special, almost noble, affinity with the American environment, or were they despoilers of it? Two historians of the environment explain the profound clash of cultures between Indians and whites that has made each group almost incomprehensible to the other.
When the historian Richard White wrote his first scholarly article about Indian environmental history in the mid-1970s, he knew he was taking a new approach to an old field, but he did not realize just how new it was.
Did the Indians have a special, almost noble, affinity with the American environment, or were they despoilers of it? Two historians of the environment explain the profound clash of cultures between Indians and whites that has made each group almost incomprehensible to the other.
When the historian Richard White wrote his first scholarly article about Indian environmental history in the mid-1970s, he knew he was taking a new approach to an old field, but he did not realize just how new it was.
Secret recordings made in the Oval Office of the President in the autumn of 1940
INTRODUCTION BY ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, an extraordinary member of an extraordinary family, always claimed that God wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin
She had been brought up to make herself useful. And always it suited her.
In the Spanish Civil War, Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion fought for their principles
After six months of war, a parade or demonstration barely ruffled the surface of downtown Barcelona.
For ten tumultuous years Sam Adams burned with a single desire: American independence from Great Britain.
AMERICAN HERITAGE takes part in announcing an astonishing discovery at Yale—the earliest map ever found that shows any part of America. Traced to a copyist in Basel about 1440 A.D., it shows, long before Columbus, the New World lands discovered by the Norsemen. Authenticated by painstaking scholarly detective work at Yale and the British Museum, it opens the door to tantalizing historical speculations
History, like an iceberg, lies mostly submerged, hidden from our sight; only rarely, through some strange upset, does a forgotten portion of it suddenly rise up and give us a glimpse backward through the mists of time.