1960s

Eugene Meyer | Winter 2024

In an instant on November 22, 1963, morning in America became mourning in America.

Edwin S. Grosvenor | June 2020

The year 1970 was a watershed, so we asked several thoughtful writers to reflect on some key events.

Some of us remember dreaming, 50 years ago, of a computer small enough to fit in our home. And a telephone without wires.

How Burning Man Got So Hot

Bruce Watson | September/October 2019

The annual Burning Man Festival in Black Rock City, Nevada, is a week-long binge of festive dress, radical inclusion, and pyrotechnic display that has become a spiritual phenomenon.

Bruce Watson is a Contributing Editor at American Heritage and has authored several critically acclaimed books. He writes a history blog at The Attic.

Flashback to Woodstock

Philip Kopper | Summer 2009

Forty years ago, a few rich kids hatched a nutty idea that became an event that rocked the nation, then morphed into a movement whose legacy lives on.

First Blood in Vietnam

Stanley Karnow | Winter 2010

A magazine reporter covered the first American deaths in Vietnam, unaware that the soon-to-explode war would mark America’s awakening to maturity.

On the evening of July 8, 1959, six of the eight American advisers stationed at a camp serving as the headquarters of a South Vietnamese army division 20 miles northeast of Saigon had settled down after supper in their mess to watch a movie, The Tattered Dress, starring

The Cost of Living

Phil Patton | October 2006

What we spent to get through 1964

The Home

1964 - The Year At A Glance

October 2006

January 11 Surgeon General Luther L. Terry releases his report on cigarette smoking. January 16 Hello, Dolly! opens at the St. James Theater in New York City.

1964 - The Year the 60s Began

Joshua Zeitz | October 2006

Viewing a transformation that still affects all of us—through the prism of a single year

Fly Me to the Moon

Max Rudin | December 1998

Reflections on the Rat Pack: Many people know what they did. This is what they meant.

On January 19, 1961, at a gala in Washington’s National Armory on the eve of his Inauguration, President-elect John Kennedy made a remarkable gesture. He rose to tell the crowd, “We’re all indebted to a great Frank Sinatra.”

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Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.