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La Salle On The Mississippi
The annals of American exploration, studded as they are with action and adventure, hold no story more heroic, in the exact, Homeric sense of this much abused word, than that of the Sieur de la Salle, fighting every obstacle which civilization, savage man, and nature could devise to penetrate to its end the valley of the Mississippi. No one has described it better, although his book is largely...
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The Peaceable Ambassadors
No two countries have ever had more reason to he grateful to their diplomats than England and the United States at the time of the Civil War. More than once during those four years, if the American minister in London or the British minister in Washington had made a false step, or even pressed an advantage too far, the whole rickety structure of neutrality would have collapsed. Charles Francis...
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When The Headlines Said: Charlie Schwab Breaks The Bank
 On the thirteenth of January, 1902, William E. Dodge, a large stockholder in the United States Steel Corporation, was reading his copy of the New York Sun in his comfortable Madison Avenue residence. No event of unusual importance dominated the staid Sun’s front page, but Mr. Dodge found a small item in the right-hand column that stirred him deeply. Beneath the headline, SCHWAB BREAKS...
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Pennsylvania Sunday Best
Well over a century has passed since a small group of itinerant artists wandered through the German settlements of southeastern Pennsylvania, making a precarious living and incidentally founding a fascinating provincial school of American portraiture. Talent brushed some of them lightly, and sometimes inspiration, even if most of the time their minds were largely occupied with the prospects for...
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The Lowest Ebb
 If any point of reference in American history is fixed in the public imagination it is the Administration of President Ulysses S. Grant. It stands for the all-time low point in statesmanship and political morality in our history. Historians have found little with which to quarrel in this popular characterization. They have, in fact, contributed no little toward the shaping of it. They have...
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The Harrisons Of Berkeley Hundred
Berkeley Hundred, as a working plantation still in operation after more than three centuries, is older than any English-speaking settlement in America outside Virginia. In fact, a Thanksgiving was celebrated on its river front and an experiment made there with corn whiskey before the Puritans, setting sail in one of the boats bound for Virginia, were blown off their course and landed in New...
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La Salle And The Discovery Of The Great West
The story of La Salle’s exploration was magnificently told in Francis Parkman’s The Discovery of the Great West. First published in 1860, this classic work was completely revised after Parkman gained access to a treasure trove of French manuscripts, and was republished in 1879. A selection from Parkman’s history, dealing with La Salle and the episodes which are shown in the Catlin paintings,...
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Reading, Writing And History
The brave mortal who makes the teaching of history his profession labors under many of the disadvantages that beset the editor of a newspaper. There is no set formula for him to follow, which is just another way of saying that there is no one right way for him to behave because in the end so much of his effectiveness depends on his ability to play it by ear. He has to have a wide...
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The Birth Of A Boom Town
The day of July 16, 1926, began as an average day for the residents of Seminole, but it was destined to be far different and one that they would long remember. It was a very hot day, and the people of this small farming town in Oklahoma went about their daily business not knowing that in a very few hours the course of their lives would be changed completely. The few hundred residents had no...
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"I Fired The First Gun And Thus Commenced The Great Battle”
When the Monitor and the Merrimac fought the world’s first engagement between ironclads at Hampton Roads, Virginia, on March 9, 1862, the executive officer of Monitor was the very junior Lieutenant S. Dana Greene, 22 years old and only three years out of Annapolis. When Monitor’s commander, Captain John L. Worden, was wounded during the engagement, Lieutenant Greene succeeded to the command; and...
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Our Hard-pressed Ex-presidents
From one of his slow-paying subscribers, the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger received in 1850 the following apologetic letter. The author, who had been billed for $1.25, was the former President of the United States, then in retirement at Sherwood Forest, on the James River. Sherwood ForestApril 5, 1850 Dear SirYour note of the 30 March reached me by last mail and I hasten to...
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The Romantic Cottage
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History Comes To The Plains
The Forty-ninth Parallel ran directly through my childhood, dividing me in two. In winter, in the town on the Whitemud, Saskatchewan, we were almost totally Canadian. The textbooks we used in school were published in Toronto and made by Canadians or Englishmen; the geography we studied was focussed upon the Dominion, though like our history it never came far enough west or close enough to the...
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When The Wild Northern Boundary Stretched To The Sea, A Government Artist Recorded The Rugged Surveying Job
  Out beyond the land which Mr. Stegner describes, the Forty-ninth Parallel climbs through even more primitive country to the crest of the Rockies, or “Stony Mountains.” Here the line ended, by the Treaty of 1818. The rest, a high, cold mountain wilderness, lay in the Oregon country, jointly occupied by Britain and the United States. Americans and Britons nearly came to blows over this...
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Woodrow Wilson Wouldn’t Yield
Only a quarter century before the United States took a major part in forming the United Nations at San Francisco in 1945, the same nation sharply turned its back on the predecessor world organization, the League of Nations, and broke the heart of its stubborn, idealistic architect. The story of this great negative decision, still a matter of debate, is examined here by Thomas A. Bailey, Byrne...
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Great Days Of The Overland Stage
For a town which had been surveyed only a few months earlier, Tipton, Missouri, began life with a creditable little bang on October 9, 1858. That was the day the first Overland Mail stage arrived, twenty-three days and four hours out of San Francisco—a day that marked the beginning of regular mail service across the continent. Tipton was 160 miles west of St. Louis at the end of the Pacific...
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A Lion In The Street
  On August 8, 1911, a committee of the House of Representatives was interrogating George W. Perkins, a former partner of the House of Morgan, about the control of the Morgan firm over the steel industry. Tempers matched the heat of the Washington weather as the questioning ranged over every aspect of the firm’s affairs. Time and again the witness and Chairman Augustus O. Stanley...
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Lost Elegance
The Mansion is what the children of the district call it, knowing nothing of its history. It stands narrowly on its once rural hill, as it has these 200 years, in a peripheral Boston slum where the tide of middle-class respectability ebbed two generations ago. Roxbury, between Uphams Corner and the Dudley Street terminal, is not the place where one would expect to find a royal governor’s...
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Lord of the Law
A nation that has weathered a successful revolution, at once sweeps a prideful arm over the blackboard and erases all previous national history. It is a naïve and very human gesture. We saw it in Russia after 1917, in France after 1789, in North America after, let us say, 1787 and the Constitutional Convention. The United States, standing tall if a bit uncertain on its feet, cast off the hand of...
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Tears And Laughter
They were, without question, the busiest people on earth. When they were not fighting Indians, Mexicans, or each other, they were hacking a nation of cities, farms, and factories out of the continental wilderness. In spare moments they built graceful steamboats, high-stepping railroad engines, and tall sailing ships to seek the world’s commerce. Rough, practical, hard-handed, these Nineteenth-...
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Abby, Julia, And The Cows
In the early morning of January 8, 1874, a momentous procession moved along the quiet Main Street of the small New England town of Glastonbury, Connecticut. Led by an implacable town official, who doubled as constable and tax collector, seven Alderney cows plodded toward the auction block, their reluctant progress urged by four men, a dog, and a drum. Behind followed some forty-odd local citizens...
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The Defeat, The Lesson, The Victory
West of Chestnut Ridge—the last impressive barrier of what was called the Endless Mountains—a fork of land was formed by the junction of two great rivers. From the north the Allegheny came tumbling down, swift and clear two centuries ago; and moving up from its source somewhere in the southern Appalachians was the Monongahela, a deep, still body of water. Where they met, the Ohio River was formed...
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Cornflake Crusade
In the midst of all the social change at the end of the last century, the United States underwent a minor revolution to which social historians have paid little attention. Its principal breeding ground was the little town of Battle Creek, Michigan, from which a major assault was delivered on the eating habits of the nation. AMERICAN HERITAGE herewith presents portions of Gerald Carson’s...
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Cornflake Crusade
At one of the first American “health resorts” in upstate New York, shortly before the Civil War, a bilious health seeker named Albert Wheeler munched his Graham cracker and committed his thoughts to paper: “Everyone,” he wrote, “is jostling his neighbor and his mouth is filled with pork, rum and tobacco.” A Massachusetts man, Wheeler had seen what a breakfast of pork and beans and pie...
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The Breakfast Foods From Battle Creek As Seen By The Nation’s Cartoonists
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Reading, Writing And History
Conscience and Midnight A national conscience can be a very strange thing, especially when the nation involved is America. It is not quite the same as the conscience of an individual human being, the chief difference being that it tends to operate after the event; that is, it functions less to keep society from sin than to bring about a return to first principles after the sin has been committed...
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Primer From A Green World
Late in the year 1825 two riders jogged into Oxford, Ohio, from the Cincinnati road and pulled up at the old college building. Down from the saddles slipped a man and a boy, William Holmes McGuffey and his nine-year-old brother Alexander H. The unknown new professor carried a bag of books and a roll of clothing to a room on the second floor of the old wing. He was 25 years old, about to be...
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The Clothes Lincoln Wore
Mr. Lincoln’s wardrobe remains the prototype of the armor of Nineteenth-Century statesman. Rooted in the noble visual line of his heroes, Webster and Clay, it was essential to his career before the bar and in elected office. Within this proper black shell, affected by all ambitious men, burned the emotions of the convulsive Nineteenth Century—including the rich humanity of Old Abe. It was the...
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The Perils Of The Waltz
Among the most disgusting of these importations is the fashion of waltzing, which is becoming common here of late. It was introduced, as I understand, by a party of would-be fashionables that saw it practiced at the operas, with such enchanting languor, grace, and lasciviousness that they fell in love with it and determined to bless their country by transplanting the precious exotic. I...
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Philip Hone’s New York
When Davy Crockett, profusely billed as “the wild frontiersman,” visited New York in 183], he made such a hullabaloo trying to live up to his reputation in his hotel room at the American Hotel, in the choice row fronting City Hall Park, that he infuriated the neighbors, chief among them Philip Hone, sometime mayor ol New York and its most respected resident. Nevertheless, the former...
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History And How To Write It
In the period before the appearance of the new AMERICAN HERITAGE, when the Society of American Historians was studying was of establisliing n sound popular magazine of history, the following article mis written by tlie late Dixon Wecter. its a kind of charter for sitcli a magazine. Wecter lent his buoyant personality, keen mind, mid ricli fund of knowledge to many worthy enterprises. This...
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Eminent Historians
In the beginning, noble Greeks and Romans Stylists made history a high literary art In America a century ago, historians were best sellers Some were explorers in the field… Some recluses in the study Some let the facts alone speak… Some relied on interpretation Others were recruits from...
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A Few Men In Soldier Suits
Few of the Americans in Paris at Christmas time, 1944, were at all alarmed over the sudden German breakthrough. The French, who are pessimists from experience, were scared and thought the Bodies were coming back, but Americans are never pessimists and they never seem to have had any experience. The SHAEF public relations division called off its Christmas party in a bored gesture toward the...
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The Philosopher’s Wife And The Wolf At The Door
Wives of prominent men are often overlooked, Their contributions, however vital to the domestic circle, shrink in comparison with those of their husbands outside the home. So it was with Abba May Alcott. While the names of Bronson, her husband, and of Louisa May, their daughter, are well known, who today is familiar with the unsung woman who helped to bring their careers to fruition? For years...
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Soldier’s Return
Sandy Welsh was hired man on my great-uncle’s farm, just below our house—the Brick Farm House farm. But to put it this way will give you quite the wrong idea of what he was to Uncle Xiram and Uncle Niram to him. For “hired man” in Vermont, particularly in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, does not mean at all what it means in some places and in some times. Sandy was an Irish boy, lovable,...
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Victory At New Orleans
On August 24 and 25, 1814, British forces were in full possession of Washington; from August 29 to 31 other forces held Alexandria. From September 11 to 14 they were feeling out the defenses of Baltimore. Then the greater part of them vanished out of sight; once the British ships were over the horizon there was almost no means of knowing where they were and far smaller means of knowing what...
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When Cotton Mather Fought The Smallpox
“The Town is become almoft an Hell upon Earth, a City full of Lies, and Murders, and Blafphemies, as far as Wifhes and Speeches can render it fo: Satan feems to take a ftrange Pofsession of it, in the epidemic Rage, againft that notable and powerful and fuccefsful way of faving the Lives of People from the Dangers of the Small-Pox . What can I do on this Occafion, to gett the miferable Town...
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New England Summer
It was the afternoon of America. As the Nineteenth Century turned slowly into its final quarter, the life most New Englanders knew was that of the small town or the farm. In their land of long winters, the most precious time was summer when the smells, the sounds, and silences of nature were all the more acute for being crowded into so brief a span. All the world had an early-morning...
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The Terrible Triangle Fire
Most fires start small; few are chosen to make an impact on history. The tragic Triangle Waist Company fire, which consumed 146 lives, most of them young girls, on March 25, 1911, was one of the latter. The fire, which swept the top three floors of the ten-story Asch building—now the Brown building of New York University—one block east of Washington Square on the northwest corner of Washington...
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A Spy For Washington
The finest Christmas present, and the most unexpected, our country ever received was handed to us by George Washington in the dismal winter of 1776 when he crossed the Delaware and captured Trenton just as the faltering fires of the American Revolution seemed about to go out. There were to be other hard winters before independence was won, Valley Forge among them, but none more critical...
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The Tour Of Prince Napoleon
On July 27, 1861, Prince Napoleon of France, cousin of Emperor Napoleon III, arrived in New York for a two-month tour of the United States, which was then just beginning the great struggle of the Civil War. In his train was an aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Colonel Camille Ferri Pisani, who wrote a series of letters describing the trip and sent them to Colonel de Franconiere, another of the Prince’...
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Reading, Writing And History
Fable Agreed Upon A Mild Murderer History Perverted
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Fable Agreed Upon
History, it has been said, is all too often a fable agreed upon. Far underneath myth and legend, in any given period, there is a certain kernel of fact; men did thus and so, they were acted upon by this and that compelling motive, and what they did had certain concrete results. But the exact sequence of events and the chain of causation that went with that sequence have a way of getting lost;...
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A Mild Murderer
The horrid fascination which the Hitler epoch exerts on inquiring minds extends to the personalities involved; and the oddest of all the odd lot of queer fish who swam across that scene must by all accounts be the man who built up and operated the SS, Heinrich Himmler himself. If no man is a hero to his valet, no man is likely to be a hero to his masseur, either, and it is Dr. Felix Kersten,...
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History Perverted
The story is not yet complete. Mr. Reitlinger indicates where the historian’s responsibility lies, and Dr. Kersten presents a slice of the miserable material with which the historian is obliged to work. It remains to take a look at the way in which history wrongly written and basely interpreted can twist the life of a whole nation out of shape. We stick with the boys in the jackboots—the...
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When The President Disappeared
When Charles Francis Adams called what happened to the United States in 1893 its “most deep-seated financial storm,” his metaphor was weak. More than a storm, it was a major earthquake, a violent onset of national growing pains which upheaved the young country’s financial crust and shook the whole continental economy along major fault lines.The Republicans’ high protective tariffs had put fat...
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Dr. Keen Makes Another Appearance
Twenty-eight years later, at the age of 84, the surgeon who helped save President Cleveland appeared again at an important medical moment in the annals of the presidency, although he could not have known it at the time. In August, 1921, while vacationing nearby, Dr. William W. Keen was summoned to Campobello Island in New Brunswick, Canada, as a consultant in diagnosing Franklin D. Roosevelt, who...
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George Washington’s Great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Slept Here
In 1539 the former mayor of the town of Northampton, England, a prosperous wool merchant named Lawrence Washington (the great-great-great-greatgreat-grandfather of George Washington) settled north of Oxford in the hill country known as the Cotswolds. There he built a handsome stone cottage for himself and his large family which he called Sulgrave Manor. In 1539 the former mayor of the town...
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Heyday Of The Floating Palace
More than 270 years had slipped by since Hernando de Soto first stumbled onto the Mississippi, and in all that time the river had been host to an increasing variety of boats. For longer than anyone could reckon, the sleek canoes of the Indian had been there, but slowly and almost imperceptibly they began to be outnumbered by the arks, keelboats, and flatboats of the white man, laden with furs and...
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The Sergeant Major’s Strange Mission
On the night of October 20, 1780, the weathered tents of the Continental Army were pitched in the rolling cattle country around Totowa above the Great Falls of the Passaic in New Jersey. Rain was making, and the night was moonless and black.About ten o’clock, Sergeant Major John Champe of Lee’s Light Horse Corps slipped past the camp guards and trotted out on the road that ran southeastward...
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