Jimmy Carter

Daniel Yergin | Winter 2025

The presidency of Jimmy Carter was both shaped and bracketed by energy.

Editor's Note: Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of S&P Global, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for

Kai Bird | Spring 2023

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

The Enigma of Jimmy Carter

Jonathan Alter | November 2020

Critics saw him as weak, but, in his single term in office, Carter had significant achievements in foreign affairs, the environmental, and energy policy.

Editor’s Note: The author was a longtime columnist and senior editor at Newsweek, and since has been a television commentator, documentary filmmaker and author of three New York Times bestsellers.

Flying Coach to Cairo

Mark K. Updegrove | August/September 2006

Nixon, Ford, and Carter developed a friendship of sorts on a memorable flight to Cairo to honor the recently slain Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat.

Jimmy Carter was at home in his study in Plains, Georgia, on October 6, 1981, when the call came in a little after daybreak. A reporter was on the line asking for his response to the attempted assassination of Anwar Sadat.

There We Go Again

Terry Golway | August/September 2004

In their surprisingly short history, presidential debates have never lived up to our expectations. Yet they’ve always proved invaluable.

How to Lose the Next Election

Kevin Baker | February/March 2000

Americans won’t choose a president who chides them.

“I no longer believe that there is a moral majority.

How the Seventies Changed America

Nicholas Lemann | July/August 1991

The “loser decade” that at first seemed nothing more than a breathing space between the high drama of the 1960s and whatever was coming next is beginning to reveal itself as a richer time than we thought.

That’s it,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then U.S. ambassador to India, wrote to a colleague on the White House staff in 1973 on the subject of some issue of the moment. “Nothing will happen.

Taking Another Look At The Constitutional Blueprint

The Editors | May/June 1987

In this year of the bicentennial of the Constitution, American Heritage asked a number of historians, authors, and public figures to address themselves to one or both of these questions:

When Presidents Tell It Their Way

Geoffrey C. Ward | August/September 1985

Only ten of our 40 presidents have written accounts of their time in the White House.

Samuel Eliot Morison Award 1978

October/November 1978

David McCullough’s
THE PATH BETWEEN THE SEAS

It is very rarely that a book of history has an important impact on current events.

Of Human Rights… And Wrongs

Bruce Catton | October 1977

America has taught the world that freedom is humanity’s birthright. Why should we expect President Carter to keep quiet about it?

We Americans pride ourselves on our sophistication. We like to think that we are worldly-wise and cynical.

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Featured Authors

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.

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.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.