July 2025

American Heritage was founded five years after the end of World War II. That year the Soviet Union had just tested their first atomic bomb and the Cold War was heating up. There was a real need to An extraordinary collection of historians and heads of historical societies got together 

So it is not a coincidence that our former editors, members of “the Greatest Generation” themselves, published so many essays on World War II – an incredible 1,521 essays on the war, in fact.

The Soviet Union's successful test of an atomic bomb in 1949 heightened the sense of an ongoing arms race between the two superpowers. 

There was a real need for “a renewal of our most precious possession, faith in the national ideal," as Allan Nevins wrote in the magazine. Nevins was Chair of our Editorial Advisory Committee and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history, wrote.

Why We Care About History

“The use of history is to tell us what we are,” observed the famed jurist Learned Hand in American Heritage in 1953, “for at our birth we are nearly empty vessels and we become what our traditions pour into us.”

Editor’s Note: In 1893, Adapted from Citizen Reporters: S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America by Stephanie Gorton (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2020)

In January 1903, journalist Ida Tarbell felt her usual cheerful stamina wearing thin. In the midst of an investigative series on John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil for McClure’s magazine, she began to long for escape. Not content with monopolizing the oil industry, Standard Oil had swallowed her life, too. 

“It has become a great bugbear to me,” she told her assistant, John Siddall, adding that she longed to trade in the task at hand for a trip to Europe. Instead, her work plunged her into reliving one of the most fearful chapters of her youth: the brief rebellion against Standard Oil instigated by independent oilmen of Pennsylvania including Tarbell’s own father, and memorialized as the Oil War of 1872. 

Editor’s Note: We were saddened by the recent passing of Norman Mineta and asked Alan Simpson, who served for 18 years as Republican senator from Wyoming, to write recollections of his friend for American Heritage. Mineta was a former Democratic Congressman who served as Secretary of Commerce under President Bill Clinton, then Secretary of Transportation under President George W. Bush. He was the first person of East Asian descent to be named a Cabinet secretary. 

The friendship of Norm Mineta and Al Simpson for eight decades – and their ability to work together across party lines – remain an inspiration for us all. It will be memorialized this summer with groundbreaking of the Mineta-Simpson Institute at Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, on the grounds of the camp that imprisoned Mineta’s family 80 years ago. 

On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan struck a blow to our Nation’s heart. On that very day, Federal agents came to Norm Mineta’s house to inform the family that they were “under surveillance.” That was the beginning of the odyssey for Norman Y. Mineta. 

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY at Columbia and twice Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, Allan Nevins pays a classic tribute to the value of historical study at the “grass roots” level in this thoughtful introduction to the new AMERICAN STATES SERIES. He also makes clear the need for such a series, which has been projected by the American Association for State and Local History to tell the story of America in words and pictures, through the color fill and all too little known pageant of its regional and local history. The first volume — on Vermont — is now available, and volumes on New York, Indiana, and Pennsylvania are being scheduled.    
 

By S.K. Stevens, President, AASLH

Our American heritage of freedom, with its emphasis upon tolerance, with its opportunity to achieve the utmost liberty of thought and action consistent with the good of all, with its “government of the people, by the people, for the people” is our most precious possession. 

I believe we are at long last appreciative of the fact that it is worth more to us than all the gold at Fort Knox, or the wealth represented in all our bank deposits and the value of our products of farms, mines, and factories. If our freedom is ever lost, all of these material things would mean little.