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“christmas Heritage” A Television Gift From Us To You

March 2023
1min read

We are pleased to announce that American Heritage Publishing Company, in association with WGBHTV, Boston, will present a special hour-long program for the holiday season. It is called “Christmas Heritage” and will include several unusual, highly personal views of the Christmas season in America: Oliver Jensen, former editor of this magazine, will show a selection of delightful and complicated antique toys and trace the surprising evolution of Santa Claus; N. Scott Momaday, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of House Made of Dawn , will take us on a visit to the Navaho Indians of the Canyon de Chelly for the traditional winter storytelling; Alistair Cooke will show us how the movies have celebrated Christmas through the years; and Paul Engle will narrate a dramatization of his own “An Iowa Christmas,” a warm childhood memoir that has been a Christmas classic since it first appeared in our pages in December, 1957.

“Christmas Heritage,” which is made possible by a grant from the Sun Company, will appear on the PBS network twice—once on the evening of Thursday, December 21, and again on Christmas Eve. Consult local lightings for the exact time in your area.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

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Stories published from "December 1978"

Authored by: The Editors

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The Woman’s Anti-Suffrage Movement

Authored by: Maxine Hong Kingston

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Authored by: James Royal Ladd

A newly discovered Union diary shows that Sherman’s march was about as Ruthless as Southerners have always said it was

Authored by: Richard Rhodes

“Surveyor, mountain man, soldier, businessman, wanderer, captain of emigrants, farmer…he was himself the westward-moving frontier.”

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St. Paul Celebrates the Pleasures of Winter

Authored by: John A. Garraty

Being out of work in the old days usually brought shame and humiliation. How—and why—have we changed our feelings about unemployment?

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A writer’s poignant memoir of a people whom he had been taught to fear and learned to love in a time of trouble

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A childhood reminiscence of Concord, that special Massachusetts town where the Transcendentalists chose to live their rarefied lives

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