History

Edwin S. Grosvenor | Summer 2019

We will never learn from the past if we've forgotten it. Now there's been a dramatic decline in the number of college students studying history.

My mother is 101 years old and in relatively good health, but has largely lost her memory. She doesn't recognize friends and family, nor understand where she is or what she's doing.

History and Knowing Who We Are

David McCullough | Winter 2008

Learning about history is an antidote to the hubris of the present, the idea that everything in our lives is the ultimate.

Former President Harry S. Truman once remarked that the history we don’t know is the only new thing in the world.

The Way I See It

Bruce Catton | October 1976

Remembering Samuel Eliot Morrison

The great job of the historian is to enable people to understand how things were and why they happened so in a time and at a place that are gone forever. Somehow he has to reach the irrecoverable past.

Is History Dead?

The Editors | December 1976

NO, SAY THREE AMERICAN HISTORIANS. BUT THE PATIENT IS AILING AND THEY THINK THEY KNOW WHY AND WHAT TO PRESCRIBE.

On History

John F. Kennedy | February 1964

"Americans are united by their history and by a faith in progress, justice, and freedom," writes President Kennedy

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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.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

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.