Skip to main content

With A Light Brush

March 2023
1min read

On my ninth birthday I saw Tom Mix “plain.” He wasn’t riding his famous horse, Tony. He was driving a slinky Locomobile, and he waved his white sombrero at me. In 1929 I almost met Herbert Hoover. The senator from Illinois said to my uncle as we stood in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel, “Charlie, if you’d told me your nephew was coming to Washington, he could have shaken hands with the President.” In 1938, at the end of the final examination of English 7 (I was a teaching assistant at Harvard College), John F. Kennedy rather loftily, I thought, slapped his blue book on my desk and passed into the future. (I marked his paper B —a respectable grade in those days.) In the early 1950s, carrying a letter of introduction from his niece, I called on Palmiro Togliatti at the headquarters of the Communist party in Rome. A surly, unshaven doorman told me that Comrade T had just taken off for Egypt. I spent election evening, 1948, with Norman Thomas in Easthampton, Massachusetts. (He said he was glad Dewey had lost.) I had my picture taken with Adlai Stevenson right in front of my house. Once I played horseshoes with Admiral Nimitz. And so it goes.

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 1989"

Authored by: John Steele Gordon

In 1820 their daily existence was practically medieval; thirty years later many of them were living the modern life

Authored by: John F. Mariani

A restaurant critic who’s a food historian and the fortunate recipient of an Italian grandmother’s cooking follows the course of America’s favorite ethnic fare in its rise from spaghetti and a red checked tablecloth to carpaccio and fine bone china

Authored by: The Editors

A Biography

Authored by: The Editors

The Pride

Authored by: Stephen Shields

An American soldier would never forget encountering the German with an icy smile. He would later discover that the blood of innocent millions dripped from Eichman's manicured hands

Featured Articles

Famous writers including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts turned Sleepy Hollow Cemetery into our country’s first conservation project.

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.

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

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.

Roast pig, boiled rockfish, and apple pie were among the dishes George and Martha enjoyed during the holiday in 1797. Here are some actual recipes.

Born during Jim Crow, Belle da Costa Greene perfected the art of "passing" while working for one of the most powerful men in America.