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READING, WRITING, AND HISTORY

Reading, Writing, And History

March 2023
1min read

The American Tradition The Call of Duty On the Dusty Soil

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Stories published from "June 1963"

Authored by: Jeanne Van Nostrand

The crusading conservationist thought he had saved the fur seal from extinction. Then from the Pribilofs, home of the last great herd, came an alarming telegram:

Authored by: Richard M. Ketchum

Sixty-five years before the bomb destroyed Hiroshima, a medicine man from Sf. Louis dreamed up a weapons system “so terrible and devastating” as to banish war forever. He would be, he modestly admitted, the savior of mankind

Authored by: John D. Weaver

By freight train, on foot, and in commandeered trucks, thousands of unemployed veterans descended on a nervous capital at the depth of the Depression—and were run out of town by Army bayonets

The aged ex-President grew giddy and his family became alarmed as the mask-maker’s formula hardened around his venerable head

Authored by: Shelby Foote

Could ironclads successfully attack land positions? No one knew. Into the very “nest of the rebellion,” sewn with mines and ringed by bristling forts, steamed the proud monitors of the Union fleet

Authored by: Suzanne T. Cooper

Of resorts and vacationers in the long ago, when the sports wore stiff collars and the dream girls five-piece bathing suits, and Americans became reacquainted with nature

Authored by: The Editors

The Supreme Court has become the most powerful judicial body in the world. In a new series under the editorship of Professor John A. Garraty , AMERICAN HERITAGE examines the crucial, often bitterly fought cases that have helped define the Court s unique role as a shaper of the nation’s history

Authored by: Allan Nevins

Were the great business tycoons of the nineteenth century only that? A distinguished historian says no—most emphatically

Authored by: Bertha L. Heilbron

An artist turned land agent used his paintings to promote paper townsites in Minnesota. Though most of these settlements failed to materialize, his charming record of an opening frontier remains

Authored by: Louis C. Jones

Who was the prosperous Negro in the long-lost painting? Scraps of evidence pieced together have revealed him to be

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.