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Coming Up In American Heritage …

March 2023
1min read

JFK, twenty years later …

John Kennedy was shot twenty years ago, and the world mourned a lost, young, romantic leader. But recently historians have been asking: Was he really a great President? Or was he an implacable Cold Warrior, disguised as a king in Camelot? William E. Leuchtenburg sums up the current thinking.

Shadowland revisited …

Before the moviemakers came, it was just a beautiful piece of California real estate; then it was Hollywood ! In a festive holiday section on American moviemaking, Kevin Brownlow writes of Hollywood’s earliest years and the armed truce between the film makers and the landed gentry; another feature recalls the greatest collection of screen tough guys the world has ever known; and Joseph Schrank tells the incredible story of what it was like for an innocent New York writer to go west and work for Darryl Zanuck on a Betty Grable opus.

A permanent world’s fair …

The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (Epcot) was Walt Disney’s last great work. It was built to show how technology shapes, and will shape, our lives. The scholar of technology Elting E. Morison assesses how well it does the job.

Plus …

The curious chronicles of Sylvester Judd, a nineteenth-century antiquarian who devoted his life to the history of the little town of Hadley, Massachusetts, give us an unparalleled view of what life was like as America was born. All this you will read here, and much, much more.

We hope you enjoy our work.

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Stories published from "October/November 1983"

Authored by: Eric Foner

Whatever you were taught or thought you knew about the post-Civil War era is probably wrong in the light of recent study

Authored by: William Peirce Randel

On November 18, 1883, the nation finally settled on the method of synchronizing all clocks that we call standard time. Why did it take so long to figure that one out?

Authored by: The Editors

For almost four decades, Marshall Davidson, who pioneered a new genre of illustrated history, has worked with many thousands of pieces of American art. Out of them all he now selects fourteen images that have particularly enchanted him .

Authored by: The Editors

Years after one of the bloodiest and most intense battles of the war in the Pacific, a Marine Corps veteran returns to Tarawa

Authored by: Keith E. Eiler

An Interview With Gen. Albert C. Wedemeyer

Authored by: Charles Cawthon

Along this narrow stretch of sand, all the painstaking plans for the Normandy invasion fell apart. One of the men who was lucky enough to make it past the beachhead recalls a day of fear, chaos, grief—and triumph.

Authored by: Lester F. Rentmeester

After two false starts, the B-17s got through. A pilot relives the 8th Air Force’s first successful daylight raid on the German capital .

Authored by: Lewis N. Ellis

A thousand miles behind enemy lines, Liberator bombers struck Hitler’s Rumanian oil refineries, then headed home flying so low that some came back with cornstalks in their bomb bays

Authored by: John A. Garraty

Over any extended period of time, the state of historical thinking about the great national topics changes in both subtle and dramatic ways. New facts and interpretations are being debated, written about, and taught. To keep you informed, AMERICAN HERITAGE introduces the first of a series.

Authored by: Pamela C. Harriman

The great man’s daughter-in-law draws a portrait of the statesman at the top of his career and at the bottom

Featured Articles

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.