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Letters To The Editor
 A Patriot Mother’s Tale I enjoyed Edwin G. Burrows’s “Patriots or Terrorists?” in your Fall 2008 issue. As an archivist at the Historical Society of Dauphin County, New York, which houses the Graydon Collection, the reference on p. 58 to Captain Alexander Graydon’s imprisonment in 1776 jumped out at me. I wanted to share the remarkable story of his mother,...
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Editor’s Letter
Lovers of Honor We don’t hear the word “honor” used much these days; it may seem a quaint and old-fashioned notion in some circles, gone the way of dueling, cavalry charges, and trench warfare. Americans were skeptical about President Nixon’s plea for “peace with honor” in Vietnam, since we seemed neither willing to fight to win nor end the sacrifice if it was...
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Letters To The Editor
Equal Pay, Twice the Profit It was not surprising to me to read in Mr. Huntington’s article in the Summer 2009 issue, “The Emancipation Question,” that it was cheaper to produce sugar with ‘free’ labor than it would be with slave labor. It always seemed to me that slavery introduced far too many additional costs in terms of ‘getting’ and ‘keeping...
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Monticello Reborn
Times change. History changes. Take Monticello: Thomas Jefferson’s storied home and temple to the Republic’s founding has just this year gained a spectacular 42,000-square-foot visitor complex that replaces the small off-site facility. I entered the flagstone courtyard, wondering which of five stunning “pavilions” to enter first, and had a flash of déjà vu. Decades ago I was first guided...
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Grave Matters
Two hundreds years ago, Meriwether Lewis, the leader of one of America’s most famous expeditions, met an ignoble end at an obscure inn near Hohenwald, Tennessee. Two years earlier the Lewis and Clark Expedition’s triumphant return to St. Louis—after an arduous and extraordinary three-year journey to the Pacific and back—had thrilled the young nation. The 35-year-old Lewis was returning east to...
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Lombardi Rules
At the height of Operation Desert Storm in February 1991, former All-American football star Ron Kramer was watching the news on television. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, chief of U.S. ground forces in the Persian Gulf, was detailing an assault by his forces into Iraq, using arrows and diagrams to illustrate the maneuvers. Kramer, who had played tight end for Green Bay from 1957 to 1964, squinted at...
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Get Out Your Photographs!
Family photographs have long played an important role in accessing the past—and now an innovative web-based multi-media project has started archiving thousands of African-American family photos in an attempt to explore lives and history through this uniquely intimate lens.Digital Diaspora Family Reunion is the brainchild of Thomas Allen Harris, a New York-based documentary filmmaker. He is on a...
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An Artist In Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life Of General James Wilkinson, By Andro Linklater
 The late 18th- and early 19th-century U.S. soldier James Wilkinson enjoyed “one of the most extraordinary careers as a secret agent in the history of espionage,” writes Andro Linklater. Code-named Agent 13, Wilkinson provided Spanish authorities in North America with important information about American intentions and capabilities, even while he served as commander in chief of theU.S. Army...
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No Quarter: The Battle Of The Crater, 1864, By Richard Slotkin
In mid-June 1864, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and the Army of the Potomac pressed forward into Virginia toward Richmond, beginning the bloody but ultimately decisive Petersburg Campaign, which would last 292 days and embrace six major battles, 11 engagements, 44 skirmishes, six assaults, and three raids. Of all these encounters, none is more grimly memorable than the officially titled “Explosion of [...
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Drake's Rock Oil
By August 1859,   “Colonel” E. L. Drake and his small crew were disheartened. Few if any of the locals believed that oil—liquid called rock oil—could come out of the ground. In fact, they thought Drake was crazy. A small group of Connecticut investors had set Drake up in the small lumber town of Titusville in northwestern Pennsylvania to try this “lunatic” scheme. The work was slow,...
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The Pluck Heard 'Round the World
On a hot day in June 1875, 28-year-old Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant, Thomas Watson, were toiling in adjacent workshops at 109 Court Street in Boston. Under sloped attic walls of rough-sawn wood, the two men hunched over benches covered with curled wires and jar-shaped batteries filled with acid. A few years before, an inventor named Joseph Stearns had made a fortune selling Western...
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Letters To The Editor
Lovers of Honor Your Editor’s Letter on honor in the Fall 2009 issue sparked many thoughts. Honor is alive and well in many Americans today, particularly in the men and women serving in the U.S. armed forces. Yet it seems that our society encourages an attitude of entitlement. Even the Declaration of Independence says we have a right to the pursuit of happiness. We need to teach...
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JFK On Our Nation’s Memory
There is little that is more important for an American citizen to know than the history and traditions of his country. Without such knowledge, he stands uncertain and defenseless before the world, knowing neither where he has come from nor where he is going. With such knowledge, he is no longer alone but draws a strength far greater than his own from the cumulative experience of the past and a...
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Dolley's Moment...
 Curators at Montpelier, Pres. James Madison's estate near Orange, Virginia, recently installed a mural in the new visitors center cafe, which depicts Dolley Madison's courageous removal of Gilbert Stuart's famous portrait of George Washington as the British bore down upon Washington during the War of 1812. Here's the First Lady herself writing about the events to her sister on August 23,...
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Key To Cover Illustration
About the Painting: Washington and “Friends”               1.         Martin Luther King Jr.             2.         Albert Einstein          ...
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A Pox On The New World
In the summer of 1605 the French explorer Samuel de Champlain sailed along the coast of New England, looking for a likely spot to place a colony—a place more hospitable than the upper St. Lawrence River, which he had previously explored. Halfway down the Maine coast he began to find spots with good harbors, abundant supplies of freshwater, and big spreads of cleared land. The problem was...
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Massacre In Florida
In June 1564, 300 French colonists arrived at the mouth of the St. Johns River near present-day Jacksonville, Florida, after an arduous voyage across the Atlantic. Among these colons were men from some of France’s greatest noble houses, bedecked in bright clothes and suits of gilded armor, accompanied by a train of artisans and laborers. They built a triangular outer wall on the southern bank,...
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Jamestown Hangs In The Balance
Arriving at the English colony of Jamestown in late May 1610, Sir Thomas Gates was appalled by what he discovered. The fort’s palisades had been torn down, the church ruined, and empty houses “rent up and burnt.” Only 60 or so colonists remained alive of the more than 200 who had crowded into the fort the previous fall, and these were “Lamentable to behold.” Those able to raise themselves from...
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New Amsterdam Becomes New York
On September 5, 1664, two men faced one another across a small stretch of water. Onshore, just outside the fort at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, stood Peter Stuyvesant, director-general of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, his 52-year-old frame balanced on the wooden stump where he had lost a leg in battle a quarter century earlier. Approaching him aboard a small rowboat flying a flag...
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Pontiac’s War
The dead woman was one of the lowly Indian slaves known as Panis. Near Detroit in August 1762, she had helped another Pani to murder their master, a British trader. The outraged British commander in North America, Baron Jeffery Amherst, ordered them executed “with the utmost rigor and in the most publick manner.” By putting them publicly to death, Amherst meant to demonstrate that the Indians had...
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Iron Wills, Iron Ships
What the USS Monitor’s crewmen remembered most about the moments before the battle on the morning of March 9, 1862, was the silence. “Every one was at his post, fixed like a statue,” Paymaster William Keeler recalled. “The most profound silence reigned” on board the ironclad, and “if there had been a coward heart there its throb would have been audible, so...
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“The Tide Is Setting Strongly Against Us”
For a good part of 1864—the year he faced reelection—Abraham Lincoln had little faith that he would win or even be renominated. Despite the decisive Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg the year before, the Confederacy had sustained recent victories outside Richmond at the Crater and Cold Harbor. Three long and bloody years of war, with still no end in sight, had rallied significant...
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A Graceful Exit
As April 1865 neared, an exhausted Abraham Lincoln met with his two top generals, Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, to discuss the end of the Civil War, which finally seemed to be within reach. Nevertheless, the president—“having seen enough of the horrors of war”—remained deeply conflicted. To be sure, the endless sound of muddy boots tramping across City Point, Virginia, and the...
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Holiday Gift Special
 Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution by Richard Beeman (Random House) This timely book offers a thoughtful history of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which produced one of the most astounding and important documents in history. The book’s central theme reveals a truth too often forgotten: that the key to finding enough common ground to unite and move...
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Lincoln Snatches The Nomination
Ten thousand delegates, reporters, and spectators poured into Chicago from 24 different states and territories the second week of May 1860—all fully believing, as one put it, that their choice “would be the next President of the United States.” That year’s Republican convention would prove to be one of the most important political gatherings in U.S. history.These Republicans, assembling for only...
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Editor’s Letter
This issue we ride back to the Old West and encounter the Battle of Little Bighorn and re-live the Pony Express, two of the most mythic and fascinating subjects to shape our view of the American past. One of our favorite writers, Nat Philbrick, the National Book Award-winning author of books on the Mayflower, Wilkes Expedition and whaleship Essex, gives us a rollicking, insightful look at Custer...
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Letters To The Editor
An Outstanding Issue! The short vignettes in the 60th Anniversary issue contained so many juicy tidbits: why the Pilgrims survived when preceding settlers failed (Charles Mann’s “Smallpox Epidemic”); how New York got its name (Russell Shorto’s “British Take Manhattan”); “little Jemmy Madison’s” finest moment (Joseph Ellis’s “...
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Sit-in At The Woolworth’s
Winter weather canceled the sold-out gala banquet to celebrate the opening of the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Saturday, January 30. But come Monday morning, glad throngs braved the cold to commemorate the day, 50 years earlier, when the civil disobedience of four young men in a luncheonette snowballed a change for America.They were the “...
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Twain’s Game
“Many public-school children seem to know only two dates—1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don’t know what happened on either occasion,” lamented American writer and wit Samuel L. Clemens (alias Mark Twain), whose star went out 100 years ago this April. Perennially short on cash and obstinately fascinated by inventions without promise, Twain hatched a scheme for a children’s history game...
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Lincoln Saves A Schoolboy’s Pride
 Amidst the frenetic events leading up to the Civil War, the 16th president took a moment to write a letter, now on display, to a young student Young George Patten had something he desperately wanted to tell his schoolmates. In May 1860 the eight-year-old and his father had traveled to Springfield, Illinois, and shaken the hand of Abraham Lincoln at the Republican National Convention in May...
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A Country Of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, The Mexican War And The Conquest Of The American Continent, By Robert W. Merry
James K. Polk appears doomed to remain one of our least appreciated presidents, despite Robert W. Merry’s valiant attempt to drag him from the shadows in A Country of Vast Designs. The problem lies with Polk himself, a man even Merry concedes was “drab of temperament,” with “limited imagination” and lacking in “natural leadership ability.” He was affectless, narrow-minded, and difficult, but so...
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A Measureless Peril: America In The Fight For The Atlantic, The Longest Battle Of World War II, By Richard Snow
As Richard Snow rightly suggests in the subtitle to his compelling book, the Battle of the Atlantic was the longest and certainly one of the most consequential campaigns of the Second World War, if not in world history. To use a definition offered by a historian in the British Ministry of Defence, it was “the German war-long attack on Allied (and neutral) shipping, principally by submarines, and...
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The Portable Past
Can serious history be presented on a cell phone? Handheld devices such as BlackBerrys, iPhones, and other smart phones (and even some not-so-smart) can play video, access the Internet, and display Google maps nearly as well as larger computers. Add in GPS capability, and anyone can hold a multimedia, geographically intelligent machine in the palm of one’s hand. So far, however, precious little...
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Editor’s Letter
From the early days when Bruce Catton took the helm of this magazine, it’s been our tradition to remain outside the political fray, not espousing one side or the other in the issue du jour. Rather we’ve looked to our common heritage and let our readers draw their own conclusions. And we’ve kept to that through the Korean War, Vietnam, Watergate, deadlocked presidental elections...
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Letters To The Editor
 Bronco Charlie Miller I enjoyed your article on the Pony Express in the Spring issue. As a 10-year-old boy in 1950, I lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. My friend and I would play in the Tompkins Square Park, where we often saw an old man called “Bronco Charlie Miller,” who dressed in a western outfit, hat, and boots. He told us that he was 105 years old and the last of...
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Winning Gold At Last
On March 10 hundreds of  active-duty female U.S. Air Force pilots accompanied more than 200 Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) into the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center’s 580,000-square-foot marble and glass Emancipation Hall for a long-overdue ceremony. Many of the WASP veterans had donned their original World War II navy blue uniforms without letting out a seam. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi...
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Pacific War Museum
If HBO’s 10-part Pacific series has fired your interest in World War II’s Pacific Theater, consider visiting the newly renovated and much expanded George H. W. Bush Gallery of the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas. Inside the 33,000-square-foot gallery, whose architecture evokes an aircraft carrier, pill box, and Pacific island beachhead, is a Japanese midget submarine...
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National Archives On The Civil War
A two-part traveling exhibit, “Discovering the Civil War,” which opened at the end of April in Washington, D.C., offers visitors a peek into the National Archives’ 160 million war-related documents, the most comprehensive collection in the nation. Curators have culled several hundred of the most interesting letters, photographs, and official documents, digitized them, and loaded them onto...
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The South’s Mighty Gamble On King Cotton
In the mid- to late summer of 1860, billions of soft pink and white Gossypium hirsutum blooms broke out across South Carolina, Georgia, western Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, soon to morph into puffy white bolls. Nearly 3 million black slaves fanned across this flowery inland sea. By season’s end in early winter, their harvest totaled the largest on record: with...
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Hoover Dam Turns 75
On December 21, 1928, Pres. Coolidge signed the act authorizing construction of a civilian engineering project the likes of which the world had never seen: a 726-foot-tall concrete structure that would dam the wild and flood-prone Colorado River at a cost of $49 million. By 1931, as the Great Depression continued to erode national confidence, the dam came to symbolize American resilience, can-do...
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Summer Books
 Fur, Fortune and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America by Eric Jay Dolin Through the prism of the fur trade, this topical approach relates a quite comprehensive history of the North American continent from the first Dutch voyage here in search of furs in 1611 to the signing 300 years later of an international treaty that banned pelagic sealing. In the course of those three...
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Editor’s Letter
We are honored to publish here the recollections of front-line combat in the Pacific theater by James MacGregor Burns, one of America’s most accomplished living historians. Readers of this magazine will be familiar with Burns, who has appeared many times in these pages over the past several decades and won a Pulitzer for his biography of FDR. At a recent Society of American Historians...
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A Spirit and Power Far Beyond Its Letter
The scene was wild and grand. Joy and gladness exhausted all forms of expression, from shouts of praise to joys and tears.” That was how Frederick Douglass described the moment when the words of the Emancipation Proclamation first came over the nation’s telegraph wires on January 1, 1863.But after studying the document more carefully, Douglass complained: “It was not a proclamation of ‘...
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In the Defense of the Republic
The American Civil War had cost more than 620,000 lives and had nearly torn the nation apart, but by May 1865 it was finally over. To celebrate, thousands of people gathered in Washington, D.C., to express their gratitude to the military forces that had made the Union victory possible. More than 200,000 Union troops paraded through the city in this Grand Review—but only white troops participated...
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Editor’s Letter
The cover of this magazine should alert you to some of the surprises in this 60th anniversary issue of American Heritage. If you didn’t see that George Washington has been joined by ten notable Americans you might want to take a closer look. For the past year, we debated how to celebrate this important marker in the life of a magazine with such an august tradition. At times our staff felt like...
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American Politics at Ten Paces
Numerous books codified the rules of dueling or "code duello," including the 1829 All the Stages of a Quarrel, above, which mapped the position of the duelers' assistants, or seconds, on a dueling ground.Nothing in his childhood in Gloucestershire’s quiet parish of Down Hatherley had prepared 43-year-old Button Gwinnett of Georgia for the fierce politics that he encountered after signing the...
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The President and the Lunatic
One warm summer night in 1881, a scrawny, nervous man sat in his boarding house a few blocks from the White House. Outside his window, gaslights flickered and horses clopped over cobblestones, but Charles Guiteau barely noticed. For six weeks now, a divine inspiration had festered in his fevered brain. The president, God told Guiteau, had to be “removed.”Since early June, the lunatic had stalked...
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Why The Civil War Still Matters
One hundred and fifty years after the guns began shelling Fort Sumter this April, Americans remain fascinated with the Civil War. Why do we care about a war that ended so long ago? Part of the answer lies in the continental scope of a conflict fought not on some foreign land but on battlefields ranging from Pennsylvania to New Mexico and from Florida to Kansas, hallowed ground that Americans can...
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Blackbeard's Terror
 Blackbeard, alias Captain Edward Thatch, in a rare contemporaneous rendering from Capt. Charles Johnson's 1724 A History of the Pyrates, blockaded Charles Town (present day Charleston) for two weeks in March 1718, ransoming some of its prominent citizens.One bright June day in 1718, a handful of fishermen off the coast of North Carolina were startled to see four vessels—a large heavily...
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School Tales
In these letters, we encounter 18-year-old Elizabeth “Bess” Corey, a plucky schoolteacher in rural Tennant, Iowa, at the turn of the 20th century. Her homespun epistles, redolent with frontier eloquence and rife with misspellings, speak of homesickness and the joys and challenges of teaching in a one-room schoolhouse. “Yes I’d give a ‘lick’ at my piece of candy to be home long enough to can 60...
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