1964

The Editors | October 2006

Four million Americans came into the world that year. Here are some who have already made their mark on 2006.

Jeff Bezos, January 12: Founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com; he was Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 1999.

The World’s Fair

John Steele Gordon | October 2006

It was a disaster from the beginning.

The Cost of Living

Phil Patton | October 2006

What we spent to get through 1964

The Home

The Greatest Series?

Allen Barra | October 2006

Just as the year changed the nation, so its World Series changed American sports.

1964

Richard F. Snow | October 2006

It was a very bad year for Andy Richardson.

That Was the Year that Was

Karen Hornick | October 2006

On what they still called their “home screens,” Americans got to watch the future.

The Beatles’ appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in February 1964 remains one of the most watched television events in history. Those who saw it remember it almost as clearly as they remember the near-continuous coverage of the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath the previous November.

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

The Democratic Debacle in 1964

Joshua Zeitz | June/July 2004

The Republican party ensured a landslide defeat when it nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964, but the Democrats did far more lasting damage to themselves at their convention in Atlantic City that year. In fact, they still haven’t recovered.

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Featured Authors

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.

Brinkley, Douglas

Douglas Brinkley, a distinguished professor of history at Rice University and Contributing Editor of American Heritage, has written more than 20 books, most recently The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (Harper 2009) and The Reagan Diaries (HarperCollins 2007). Brinkley earned his B.A from Ohio State University University in 1982, and his Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 1989.

Catton, Bruce

Bruce Catton (1899 – 1978) was the Founding Editor of American Heritage and arguably the most prolific and popular of all Civil War historians. He wrote an astonishing 167 articles for American Heritage, and won a Pulitzer Prize for history in 1954 for A Stillness at Appomattox, his study of the final campaign of the war in Virginia. Catton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, from President Gerald Ford, in 1977, the year before his death.

1964

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Featured Authors

Atkinson, Rick

Bird, Kai

Blight, David W.

Brinkley, Douglas

Catton, Bruce