Frederick Douglass

Linda Hirshman | Spring 2023

As he later recounted in his memoirs, Frederick Douglass endured daily beatings and forced labor before taking his chances on the road to freedom.

Born in 1818 a

“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”

African Americans In Combat

Fall 2011

Lincoln & Douglass

Stephen Kendrick, Paul Kendrick | Winter 2009

The prairie lawyer president and outspoken abolitionist formed an unusual friendship

Lincoln & Douglass

Stephen Kendrick, Paul Kendrick | Winter 2009

The prairie lawyer president and outspoken abolitionist formed an unusual friendship

The Freedman’s Bank

John Steele Gordon | December 1993

A nineteenth-century blueprint for the savings-and-loan scandal

It was a banking system. The act that made it possible slipped through Congress with hardly any debate and little attention to economic reality. Many of its highestranking officials knew little or nothing about the peculiar nature of the banking business.

What Should We Teach Our Children About American History?

Fredric Smoler | February/March 1992

The fiercest struggle going on in education is about who owns the past. Militant multi-culturalists say that traditional history teaching has brushed out minority ethnic identities. Their opponents say that radical multiculturalism leads toward national fragmentation.

In 1987 a sweeping revision of the social studies program in New York State public schools gave the curriculum a strong multicultural slant.

“Simply A Man”

Geoffrey C. Ward | February/March 1991

In August of 1863 Frederick Douglass called upon the Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, to explain why the recruiting of black troops for the Union had been slower than some had expected. Blacks wanted equal pay, he explained, and a chance for promotion.

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Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

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.

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.