Skip to main content

One Day’s Difference

March 2023
1min read

It turns out it was Thursday in New York, too, though Douglas Southall Freeman’s biography of Washington, which was our source, said Friday .

The Editors

Correction

In our February/March 1984 issue, the portfolio “The Flowering of American Flower Painting” is excerpted from a book , Reflections of Nature: Flowers in American Art, by Ella Foshay. We incorrectly stated the name of the publisher. The book was actually published by Alfred A. Knopf and serves as a catalog for an exhibit of the same name at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York .

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 "April/May 1984"

Authored by: David Davidson

Forty years ago it was Nazis, not communists, we wanted to keep out of Latin America. A veteran of that propaganda war recalls our efforts to bring American values to a bewildered Ecuador.

Authored by: Geoffrey C. Ward

MATTERS OF FACT

Authored by: Edward Sorel

Sometimes life in the past really was better

Authored by: Martin Mayer

Banking as we’ve known it for centuries is dead, and we don’t really know the consequences of what is taking its place. A historical overview.

Authored by: Richard F. Snow

The U.S. Navy’s first submarine was scrapped half a century ago. But now we have been given a second chance to visit a boat nobody ever expected to see again.

Authored by: Oliver E. Allen

Banished from public view in our cities, this two-hundred-year-old import is alive and well behind the scenes

Authored by: Alfred Kazin

The work of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald virtually defined what it meant to be American in the first half of this century

Authored by: The Editors

A gathering of little-known drawings from Columbia
University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library illuminates two centuries of American building

Authored by: David Sherwood

Happy marriages may have been all alike in the eighteenth century, but the unhappy ones
fought it out in the newspapers

Authored by: Walter Karp

When the President fired the general, civilian control of the military faced its severest test in our history

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.