A recent book argues that, to preserve the republic, we must stop worshiping an outmoded document.
Some worries surrounded these early atomic-bomb tests. Among them: Would the Pacific Ocean explode?
Our century ends as it began, with corporations rushing headlong into wedlock.
New legislation means to bring lobbyists out into the sunlight. History suggests they’ll bask there.
The father of the Pure Food and Drug Act was as hard on his allies as he was on his foes.
The saga of Liberia’s beginnings reflects both America’ humanitarian generosity and its racism.
Presidents have wanted it since before any of us was born.
Today’s states’-rights debate is in fact as old as the republic, and not yet as contentious as it got in the 1830s.
How the Bureau got those restrictions that so many people today want to see abolished
A look at the very small group of powerful and effective men who are Newt Gingrich’s truest models
We tend to see the Constitution as permanent and inviolable, but we’re always wild to change it.
Are racial tendencies immutable? Almost 90 years ago, the government spent a lot of money to find out.
What do the stunning Republican victories in the recent election mean? The answer may lie a century in the past.
An American Heritage veteran looks at our first year to see what four decades have done to our subject.
The emergence of AIDS has added new urgency to the work of an organization that turns eighty this year
No Chief Executive has ever made it out of the White House without being scalded.
The arguments raging in the current health-care debate have all been heard before.
The half-remembered Korean conflict was full of surprises, and nearly all of them were unpleasant
Haiti’s current plight is grimly familiar to anyone with the least knowledge of that country’s past.
The unquiet history of the modern state of Israel has been tied up with the United States from the beginning.
They had the perfect remedy for the bloated bureaucracy: the civil service.
It’s a politician’s bromide, and it also happens to be a profound truth. No war, no national crisis, has left a greater impress on the American psyche than the successive waves of new arrivals that quite literally built the country. Now that arguments against immigration are rising again, it is well to remember that every single one of them has been heard before.
“Ten thousand River Commissions,” wrote Mark Twain, “cannot tame that lawless stream.” But James Eads came close.
Terrorists armed with high explosives have been busy on our shores lately. America has weathered such attacks before.
First Ladies have been under fire ever since Albert Gallatin called Abigail Adams “Mrs. President.”
The sad lessons of 1919 are eloquent regarding today’s endlessly wretched situation in the Balkans.
