Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Jimmy Carter
Critics saw him as weak, but in his one term in office Carter had significant achievements in foreign affairs and 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. Read more >>
In their surprisingly short history, presidential debates have never lived up to our expectations—yet they’ve always proved invaluable
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 bigger 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. Read more >>
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: Read more >>
Only ten of our forty Presidents have written accounts of their time in the White House. Jimmy Carter’s Keeping Faith is the latest addition to that short shelf, and James Buchanan was the somewhat unlikely creator of this rare literary form. Read more >>
David McCullough’s
THE PATH BETWEEN THE SEAS
It is very rarely that a book of history has an important impact on current events. Read more >>
We Americans pride ourselves on our sophistication. We like to think that we are worldly-wise and cynical. Read more >>