On September 26, 1918, the Meuse-Argonne offensive began. The attack on the German lines in France lasted for 47 days, until the war’s end, and remains the longest battle in American history. During the assault, Gen. John J.

The Lady Brakemen

Jocelyn W. Knowles | July/August 1995

Consigned to the Pennsylvania Railroad’s “Garbage Run,” they fought their own war on the home front, and they helped shape a victory as surely as their brothers and husbands did overseas.

All the new lady brakemen on the Pennsylvania Railroad were put to work on what was officially known as the Jersey Coast Extra List.

1954

Richard Reeves | December 1994

America looked good to a high school senior then, and that year looks wonderfully safe to us now, but it was a time of tumult, and there were plenty of shadows, along with the sunshine.

It was a very good year. Certainly it was if you were 17. I was a senior in high school in 1954, a member of the class of January 1955, at Lincoln High School in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Visions of My Father

Thomas Fleming | July/August 1991

You can rise fast and far in America, but, sometimes, the cost of the journey is hard to tally.

For a long time, I have wanted to write about a vision of my father I experienced on a New York City subway train while riding downtown to a literary meeting. As a historian, I am skeptical of visions. I pride myself on my rationality, I rely on facts.

The Money Maker

Murray Teigh Bloom | August/September 1984

The Secret Service considered Emanuel Ninger a common counterfeiter. He saw himself as an American master of the impressionist school.

THE MOST PRESUMPTUOUS counterfeiter in American history was a blue-eyed, sandy-bearded, German sign painter named Emanuel Ninger. As a sign painter he was adequate; as an impressionist, a historic master. And a soaring egotist.

The Gossipy Art Of Louis Larsen

October 1976

When the Norwegian artist Lauritz Larsen Mossige emigrated to America in the early 1880’s, he settled in Deckertown—now Sussex—New Jersey, and changed his name to Louis Larsen.

His Most Detestable High Mightiness

Ormonde De Kay, Jr. | April 1976

Besides being a bigot, a fop, and a thief, the British governor Lord Cornbury, had some peculiar fetishes

Despite their many differences, Queen Anne’s North American colonies all shared a decent respect for propriety—or at least the appearance thereof.

The Signer Who Recanted

Frederick Bernays Wiener | June 1975

Under duress in a British prison, Richard Stockton of New Jersey had the singular misfortune to become

Various legends linger around the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the circumstances of the signing.

The Small Bright World Of Anna Lindner

December 1975

She was eighteen—pretty and sensitive, to judge by her photograph, taken in 1863. For many another girl, that age would have represented a new chapter in life in the form of a husband, children, a home of her own.

Trenton

Don Troiani | August 1973

Fourth in a series of paintings for AMERICAN HERITAGE

American spirits were at a low ebb as the year 1776 drew to a close.

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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.

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