Skip to main content

Our Winter Art Show

March 2023
1min read

This perfect midsummer scene, with its dark, glossy trees and sunny lawn (left), is the product of a Scottish-born painter named John Williamson, who began his career in the 1840s decorating window shades. Williamson spent most of his life in Brooklyn, but he traveled all over the Northeast, and the majority of his pictures are rural scenes of New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. He was particularly fond of the Hudson River, and it was from an estate overlooking the Tappan Zee that he made this fresh and oddly modern-looking painting in 1875.

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 "February/March 1986"

Authored by: The Editors

A set of turn-of-the-century glass-plate negatives bought at an auction prompted a New York photographer to set off for central Ohio to document architectural and social change

Authored by: Bernard Bailyn

Just before the Revolution, newly studied documents reveal, the flight of British subjects to the New World forced a panicky English government to wrestle with this question

Authored by: Brock Yates

A leading authority picks the top ten. Some of the names still have the power to stir the blood. And some will surprise you.

Authored by: Robert V. Remini

On the 150th anniversary of Texan independence, we trace the fierce negotiations that brought the republic into the Union after ten turbulent years

Authored by: William Broyles, Jr.

The Lone Star state as it once was—proud, isolated, independent, the undiluted essence of America forever inventing itself out of the hardscrabble reality of the frontier

Authored by: Tom Swafford

It took place in 1948, and it was orchestrated—with difficulty—by the program director of a faltering Portland, Oregon, radio station. He persuaded two Republican candidates to argue formally about an actual issue with no intervening moderator.

The idealists who founded this Utopian colony were singularly well versed in mystical philosophy— and singularly ignorant about farming

Authored by: Wenhui Hou

After a year at the University of Missouri boning up on American history, a Chinese professor tells what she discovered about us and how she imparts her new knowledge to the folks back home in the People’s Republic.

Authored by: Jerome Tarshis

A former Department of Defense adviser—one of Robert S. McNamara’s Whiz Kids—explains why we tend to overestimate Russian strength, and why we underestimate what it will cost to defend ourselves

Featured Articles

The world’s most prominent actress risked her career by standing up to one of Hollywood’s mega-studios, proving that behind the beauty was also a very savvy businesswoman. 

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

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.

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.