Skip to main content

Brother, Can You Spare A Billion?

March 2023
1min read

In his article on the rites of reparations (“In the News,” July/August) Bernard A. Weisberger states that in November 1923 the German mark reached 4.2 billion to the dollar. He is off by a factor of 1,000. The mark actually dropped to 4.2 trillion to the dollar!

That sort of confusion is understandable. If the author relied on British or German sources, they would (correctly) report an exchange rate of 4.2 billion marks to the dollar. To most Europeans a billion is the same as an American trillion, 1 followed by 12 zeros. An American billion, 1 followed by 9 zeros, is spoken of as a thousand million by an Englishman and a milliard by a German.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "December 1991"

Authored by: Peter Andrews

The American army that beat Hitler was thoroughly professional, but it didn’t start out that way. North Africa was where it learned the hard lessons—none harder than the disaster at Kasserine. This was the campaign that taught us how to fight a war.

Authored by: Robert Pierce

An Airman’s Sketchbook

Authored by: Nathan Ward

Tuffy’s Day

Authored by: Nathan Ward

To Set the World on Fire

Authored by: Nathan Ward

Hollywood Jumps the Gun

Authored by: Nathan Ward

Beginning of the End

Authored by: Roger J. Spiller

A MEMOIR OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Seeking the answer to a simple and terrible question: What was it like?

Authored by: Fulton Oursler, Jr.

He wanted only what every journalist of the time did: an exclusive interview with the Duke of Windsor. What he got was an astonishing proposition that sent him on an urgent top-secret visit to the White House and a once-in-a-lifetime story that was too hot to print—until now.

Authored by: John Lukacs

In 1941 the President understood better than many Americans the man who was running Germany, and Hitler understood Roosevelt and his country better than we knew

Authored by: Elliot Rosenberg

It took us longer to name the war than to fight it

Featured Articles

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.