January 2011

African-American Comedian Baseball Statistic Celebrity Trial Children’s Book Writer Conspiracy Theory Crooner Director Football Coach Founding Father Historical Museum Lincoln Speech Movie Classic Naval Battle “Old West” State Painter Soft Drink Spy War Memorial Western Figure

A great way to start out in Little Rock is by hopping on the sightseeing bus “The Little Rock and Roll.” It gives a tour that hits all the historic highlights of the city. And these historic highlights stretch back a long way. It was 1722 when the French explorer Bernard de la Harpe saw the two rocks on either side of the river, one big, one little.

Richard’s praise is extravagant, for what we have put together (with untiring help from him, of course) is just the beginning. We want the new americanheritage.com to be the definitive site for history on the Web, and to achieve that, it will grow and grow. But even at the beginning we think it offers a great deal. The highlight, and the first thing you see on the homepage, is at least one new feature article every day, timely, provocative, and touching on any aspect of our shared past. October 2005 brings us not only the 513th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery, which launches American history as we know it, but also the 10th anniversary of the O. J. Simpson verdict. Both those events have affected all of us, and we’ll cover them both and look at their import. We’ll also respond to breaking news as a six-times-a-year publication never could. When a new Chief Justice is being selected, we’ll tell you how that was done differently in the past; when Social Security comes back to the political fore, we’ll rediscover how it all began; when scandal hits Washington, as it surely will, we’ll give the perspective no one else offers.

It’s been a busy few months. Early this year Scott Masterson, my friend and colleague of a quarter-century, took the helm as president of American Heritage. Scott is a person of formidable energies, and he immediately directed them toward strengthening many areas of the company. But one mandate of his has affected our working lives more than all the others combined.

American Heritage has had a Web site for years. In an era when the humblest of enterprises has its site, we really had no choice. But I believe it’s fair to say that ours always had a whiff of the perfunctory about it.

No more.

1. Rebel Without a Cause (1955)—This is the mother of all baby boomer movies, the one that gave definition to the angst of an entire generation of suburban white teenagers. The high school students portrayed in Nicholas Ray’s film were born before World War II, but in their alienation and just plain misunderstoodness, they presaged scores of characters that followed, establishing the theme that many a movie targeted at the boomers would continue to stress: If there’s something wrong with your life, it’s probably your parents’ fault.

“With the convertible and your long hair,” the girl had said, “you must really think you’re something.” And so the next time I got drunk—which was that night—I shaved my head. This was in 1967, immediately before the arrest. “March on Cincinnati, end the war in Vietnam” was the slogan, which even then sounded absurd—even to me. After the disinfectant shower, my college mates and I were herded into the outer shell of the jail, where the more experienced prisoners could look down on us from the tiers.

“Hey, killer,” one of them called out to me, “what are you doing with the hippies?”

Membership in my much-ballyhooed generation has always been a distortion. I am mistaken for another man altogether, somebody important, or dangerous.

Dinner at the Cincinnati workhouse was spaghetti on a tin plate. The guards had automatic weapons. I was treated like a determined enemy of the state, whereas I hadn’t even decided on my major.

Richard F. Snow Fred Allen

Of all the marketing departments that helped raise the postwar generation, none were as cunning in the art of manipulation as those of the automaking companies. Any vehicle of the era could, after all, transport a person from one place to another. But then there were cars that evidently made the owner younger. Stronger, richer, or smarter. More fun at the beach.

In the matter of cars and practically everything else, baby boomers were left with the unpuritanical idea that desire is at least as important as reality. And so an accurate memoir of a baby boomer has to include an equal accounting of each. The two should rightly be relabeled, though, in deference to that third parent of the baby boomer….

Terry H. Anderson

The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America From Greensboro to Wounded Knee (Oxford, 1995). Anderson, a Vietnam veteran and history professor at Texas A&M University, presents a comprehensive and balanced portrait of boomer-generation activism in the 1960s that avoids both the triumphal and condemnatory posturing typical of other works on this subject.

James Carroll

An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us (Houghton Mifflin, 1996). Though Carroll, a former priest and anti-war activist, was born in 1943, just barely missing the arbitrary jump-off for the baby boom, his memoir of growing up in the postwar years and coming to political consciousness during the Vietnam War era is a vital contribution to boomer literature.

Steve M. Gillon