Skip to main content

Fifty Years

March 2023
1min read


Only one upset Oberlin alumna has called us to task for our typographical error—Oberlin opened in 1833, not 1883, and was coeducational from the start. Graduates of other coeducational schools have pointed out that women were accepted by Waynesburg College of Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, in 1849 (one letter); Antioch College in 1852 (one letter); St. Lawrence University of Canton, New York, in 1856 (two letters); Swarthmore College in 1864 (three letters); and North Georgia College in 1873 when it admitted one woman, the daughter of the college president (one letter).

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 "June/july 1984"

Authored by: The Editors

“We do not ordinarily mean to involve ourselves, as historians, in the incomplete events of any given moment,” wrote the editors of this magazine in 1974. But they saw the Watergate cover-up as “an assault on history itself.” Now, ten years after Richard M. Nixon was forced to resign his office rather than submit to impeachment, we have asked two eminent authors to reconsider the events of that incredible summer.

Authored by: Walter Karp

In which a President fails to fulfill his constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” And a reluctant Congress acts.

Authored by: Vance Bourjaily

A sometime “Nixon-hater” looks back on Watergate and discovers that his glee of a decade ago has given way to larger, sadder, and more generous emotions

Authored by: Jerome Tarshis

Turn-of-the-century American painters came to Venice for its ancient splendors and pearly light. In a few years they captured its canals, palaces, and people in a spirit of gentle modernism that looks better than ever.

Authored by: James Marston Fitch

In designing, the University of Virginia, Jefferson sought not only to educate young men for leadership, but to bring aesthetic maturity to the new nation

Authored by: William L. Shirer

In 1938 the European correspondent for CBS was in Austria when the Nazis marched in. He wanted to tell the world about it—but first he had to help invent a whole new kind of broadcasting.

Authored by: Robert B. Brown

It was a difficult birth, but it looks as if the child will live forever

Authored by: The Editors

From the North Woods to New Orleans with an artist-reporter of the last century

Authored by: Frederick Allen

After standing in New York Harbor for nearly one hundred years, this thin-skinned but sturdy lady needs a lot of attention. She’s getting it- from a crack team of French and American architects and engineers.

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.