Transportation

Established one hundred years ago, the famous highway is still viewed as the quintessential American experience by countless enthusiasts both at home and abroad.

Alice in Autoland

Bruce Watson | May 2023

Few roads were even paved when Alice Ramsey and three friends became the first women to drive coast to coast in 1909.

Ike's Excellent Adventure

Bruce Watson | July/August 2020

What the future president learned during a coast-to-coast military motor expedition would later transform America.

What a Glorious Creation It Was

Douglas Brinkley | June/July 2003

The Model T Ford made the world we live in. On the 100th anniversary of the company Henry Ford founded, his biographer Douglas Brinkley tells how.

"I will build a motor car for the great multitude,” Henry Ford proclaimed to the public when he announced the machine that would change America and indeed the world.

Rescue Squad

Jack Kelly | May/June 1996

TODAY, NEARLY HALF a million men and women serve two-thirds of the country in a crucial volunteer service that began only recently, and only because a nine-year-old boy had witnessed a drowning.

The Stanleys and their Steamer

John Carlova | February 1959

Teetotaling twin brothers built the most wonderful car of their era, and its day of glory may not be over yet

Death of a Dirigible

John Toland | February 1959

“Come and see the boiling cloud,” said a woman on the ground; aloft, the slender Shenandoah headed straight into the eye of the vicious squall

Railroad in a Barn

Fitzhugh Turner | December 1958

Snowshed crews on the Central Pacific, battling blizzards and snowslides, built “the longest house in the world”

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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.