July 2025

What made America great? Since many of our citizens yearn to make America great again (as if we aren't now), we thought it useful to try to define a core of what makes our nation special. What better way to celebrate our 75 years of telling the American story?

It seems a simple question, but the answer is frustratingly complex. Where to begin? With the current focus on America 250, we looked for something new to say about the Revolution. 

that we have tried to define for the last year as we “We must all hang together... or most assuredly we shall all hang separately,” Benjamin Franklin remarked as signers were putting their names on the Declaration of Independence.

At least there was no social media at the time to make their perilous action even more challenging. “When there are so many forces dedicated to dividing us, how can we hang together,” asks Walter Isaacson in his most recent book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written.

“One way,” he answers, “is by reflecting on our fundamental principles.” We came to a similar conclusion when trying to decide what theme to use in an issue in our 75th Anniversary

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.