Apollo 11

Douglas Brinkley | Winter 2026

John F. Kennedy challenged the US to accomplish what seemed impossible: put men on the lunar surface by the end of 1960s

It will not be one man going to the moon . . . it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there. –President John F. Kennedy, May 25, 1961

Slideshow of Apollo 11 Photos

Matthew Palatnik | Summer 2019

In honor of the 50th Anniversary of the epic voyage of Apollo 11 to the Moon 50 years ago this summer, we combed the NASA archives to compile this slideshow of extraordinary images from the trip. Many of the photos have rarely been seen. Click on the photo below to start the slideshow.

Remembering Neil Armstrong

Richard Truly | Summer 2019

The first man to set foot on the Moon 50 years ago this summer is remembered by his friend and colleague, a former astronaut and administrator at NASA.

Shooting the Moon

Walter A. McDougall | Winter 2010

Practical, rather than idealistic, reasons pushed President Kennedy to challenge America to land a man on the moon within the decade.

My Moon Shot in Lebanon, Ohio

The Readers | July/August 1999

Fast Forward

Richard F. Snow | July/August 1994

It is always a bit surprising to be reminded of how compressed our national history is. Robert E.

Doorway to Space

Ray Smith | November 1990

As I watched the lunar landing on television, my part in the whole scenario took on a new meaning.

Apollo 11 was the fir

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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.