Skip to main content

Coming Up In American Heritage…

March 2023
1min read


Memoirs of a Kansas homesteader…

Those who obeyed Greeley’s injunction and went west did not always have an easy time of it. On the Kansas prairies in the 187Os the difficulties—drought, plagues of locusts—were of biblical scope. Although many prevailed, many others gave up. This unusual firstperson account tells the story of pioneers who went through it all—and decided it wasn’t worth it.

Fear of the city…

Alfred Kazin traces the symbolic role that the city—as a fact and as an idea—has played in the American consciousness for two hundred years. The dread, he notes, seems to be increasingly well founded.

Three American scholars on three Americans …

John Kenneth Galbraith writes, from a special perspective, on Franklin D. Roosevelt; Jacques Barzun tells how the philosopher-psychologist William James came to choose his career; and Malcolm Cowley remembers, with unblinking clarity, life with his difficult mother.

Plus …

Lincoln was the first President to understand the importance of cooperating with the media, of getting his face before the public. In his day that meant painters and sculptors as well as photographers. The fruits of that cooperation are seen in a particularly handsome pictorial feature. … When an earthquake struck San Francisco in 1906, a studio photographer named J.B. Monaco did what any great photographer would do: he grabbed a small camera, ran outside, and photographed the real world as it disintegrated.… All this and, as always, more.

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.

Donate

Stories published from "December 1982"

Authored by: Adam Smith

The most influential economist in the United States talks about prudence, productivity, and the pursuit of liquidity in the light of the past

Authored by: Robert Bendiner

One man measures his life-span against the length of recorded history and finds tidings of comfort and hope

Authored by: Marcus Cunliffe

Conjectural or speculative history can be a silly game, as in “What if the Roman legions had machine guns?” But this historian argues that to enlarge our knowledge and understanding it sometimes makes very good sense to ask …

Authored by: Ross Anderson

He loved women so much he painted wings on them. After years of neglect, he is now being appreciated.

Authored by: James Dill

A soldier remembers the freezing, fearful retreat down the Korean Peninsula after the Chinese armies smashed across the border

Authored by: Judson Mead

Here is the federal government’s own picture history of our times—and it tells us more than you might think

Authored by: Peter Andrews

But was Louis Moreau Gottschalk America’s first musical genius or simply the purveyor of sentimental claptrap?

Authored by: James Mckinley

How the colossus of the “social expression industry” always manages to say it better than you do

Authored by: Joan Paterson Kerr

From Germany and Switzerland, farmer-potters transplanted their skills to Pennsylvania and produced a distinctive ceramic found nowhere else in America

Authored by: Shirley Abbott

How the mistress of the plantation became a slave

Featured Articles

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.

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

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.