October/november 1984
Features
Peter Marié, a bon vivant of the Gilded Age, asked hundreds of Society’s prettiest women to allow themselves to be painted for him alone
A disease that no one understood laid waste a major American city. Five thousand died in two months, and Memphis was never the same again.
Here is how political cartoonists have sized up the candidates over a tumultuous half-century.
How our wartime experience conquered a wide range of problems from hemorrhagic shock to yellow fever
How a favorite local charity of Boston’s Brahmins—parochial and elite—grew into one of our great democratic medical institutions
While the Wright Brothers experimented at Kitty Hawk, a photographer named William Jennings believed he and his friends were making aviation history
America has won more Nobel Prizes in medicine than any other nation: it’s easy when you have the money, the technology, and people from every other nation
Americans have never been so healthy, thanks to advances in medical technology and research. Now we have to learn to deal with the staggering costs.
The Great Lakes hurricane of 1913 was a destructive freak. As far as lakers were concerned, it was …
American medicine in a crucial era was at once surprisingly similar and shockingly different from what we know today. You could get aspirin at the drugstore, and anesthesia during surgery. But you could also buy opium over the counter, and the surgery would be more likely to be performed in your kitchen than in a hospital.
Departments
CORRESPONDENCE
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
MATTERS OF FACT
NOW AND THEN
POSTSCRIPTS TO HISTORY
READERS’ ALBUM
THE TIME MACHINE
American Heritage is proud to host the
National Portal to
Historic Collections
Recently added:
- American Revolution Center
- National Museum of Civil War Medicine
- National Museum of the U.S. Navy
- Manassas National Battlefield
- Maryland State House
In association with the
American Association for State and Local History
Why do we need a national nonprofit membership society for American history?
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“Save America’s Treasures” has been totally eliminated—the largest Federal program supporting preservation of such treasures as the original Star Spangled Banner and George Washington’s tent.
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65% of Americans don’t know what happened at the Constitutional Convention, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
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The “Teaching American History” grants—the largest Federal program supporting history education—have been completely eliminated.
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Visits to the Top 20 Civil War battlefields have dropped in half from 1970 to 2009 according to official National Park Service statistics.
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40% of Americans can’t identify whom we fought in World War II, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
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A quarter of Americans believe Congress shares power over U.S. foreign policy with the United Nations, according to a recent Annenberg survey.
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“There is little that is more important for an American citizen to know than the history and traditions of his country,” John F. Kennedy wrote in American Heritage.
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The “We the People Program,” which touched some 30 million students and 90,000 teachers over 25 years, has been completely eliminated.
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Two-thirds of Americans could not correctly name Yorktown as the last major military action of the American Revolution, according to a recent national Gallup survey.
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The National Heritage Areas and Scenic Byways program, the only major Federal program encouraging visits to historic places, has been completely eliminated in Congressional committee.
