America 250

“What, to the American Slave, Is the Fourth of July?”

Bruce Watson | Summer 2019

In what many consider the greatest anti-slavery oration ever given, Frederick Douglass called for “the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”

Rethinking the Boston Massacre

Eric Hinderaker | Special Issue - George Washington Prize 2018

It is one of the most notorious incidents in American history, and also one of the least understood.

A little after 9:00 p.m. on March 5, 1770, a detachment of British soldiers fired into a crowd of townspeople on King Street in Boston, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The result—the “Boston Massacre”—has echoed through the pages of newspapers, pamphlets, and history books ever since.

How One Man Launched a Revolution

Christine Gibson | Spring 2018

Thomas Paine's Common Sense helped Americans "decide upon the propriety of separation,” as George Washington said.

In May 1775, the Reverend Jonathan Boucher, rowing across the Potomac, met George Washington rowing in the other direction on his way to the Continental Congress. The two conversed briefly on the fate of the colonies, and Boucher asked Washington if he supported independence.

With Little Less Than Savage Fury

Thomas B. Allen | Fall 2010

America’s first civil war took place during the Revolution, an ultra-violent, family-splitting, and often vindictive conflict between "patriots" and loyalists.

On April 22, 1775, three days after a British column marched out of Boston and clashed with militiamen at Lexington and Concord, the news—and the cry of Revolution!—reached Danbury, Connecticut, where 18-year-old Stephen Maples Jarvis was working on the family farm.

Big Guns For Washington

Clay Perry | April 1955

How tough Henry Knox hauled a train of cannon over wintry trails to help drive the British away from Boston

Patriots or Terrorists?

Edwin G. Burrows | Fall 2008

The Lost Story of Revolutionary War POW’s

Sometime that seismic spring of 1776, 16-year-old Levi Hanford of Norwalk, Connecticut enrolled in his uncle’s militia company and went to war against the British. He expected to make short work of the enemy.

The Turning Point in the Revolutionary War

Richard M. Ketchum | October 1997

A few hundred yards west of the Hudson, as you enter Schuylerville on Route 29, the sign is on your right. It’s an old, faded sign, not very large, and unless you slow down, you’ll miss it.

Making Sense of the Fourth of July

Pauline Maier | July/August 1997

The Declaration of Independence is not what Thomas Jefferson thought it was when he wrote it, and that's why we celebrate it.

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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.