Legal history

Joseph Connor | Spring 2026

A Constitutional crisis erupted when President Lincoln authorized the Army to arrest suspicious persons without due process after Maryland rebels tried to cut off Washington.

Editor’s Note: Joseph Connor is a Contributing Editor for American Heritage, member of the Supreme Court bar, and former prosecutor at the Morris County (NJ) Prosecutor's Office.

“The Law is King”

Matthew Spalding | Winter 2026

The Rule of Law is the great foundation of our Constitution and our Nation.

Washington, portrayed

Marshall Transforms the Courts

Richard Brookhiser | Winter 2026

Even more important than the substance of Marshall’s rulings was what they said about the power of the Supreme Court and the nature of the Constitution.

Editor’s Note: Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor at the National Review and author of over a dozen books, including ones on George Washington, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton.

The Long Life and Broad Mind of Mr. Justice Holmes

Louis Auchincloss | June/July 1978

“Take The Hatred Away, and You Have Nothing Left”

Thomas Fleming | December 1968

An African-American physician and his family were arrested for murder in Detroit after defending their home against an angry mob of whites. Then attorney Clarence Darrow came to their defense.

Lord of the Law

Catherine Drinker Bowen | June 1957

The fathers of American independence founded their case on “that wonderful Edward Coke … masterful, masterless man,” who made two English kings bow to the common law

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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.