Special Issue: What Made America Great

Welcome to the largest issue of American Heritage ever published! We will be adding essays over the next weeks.

A year ago, we debated what to do for the magazine's 75th Anniversary. Given the widespread confusion about what our nation stands for, we decided to go back to basics, to remind readers of some of the values, principles, and accomplishments that in fact “Made America Great.”

The need is obvious. Today, the United States faces real threats around the world, and we need citizens and allies that believe in what America stands for. As Benjamin Franklin told the Declaration signers 250 years ago, “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Walter Isaacson echoed Franklin in his recent book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. “How can we hang together,” he asked, “when there are so many forces dedicated to dividing us? One way is by reflecting on our fundamental principles.” 

We came to a similar conclusion when deciding what theme to focus on for this 75th Anniversary issue. Our nation needs to continue to provide an example, to build on what so many have contributed to over the last 250 years.

American Heritage was founded five years after the end of World War II, just as the Cold War was heating up. The Soviet Union had tested their first atomic bomb and Communists were consolidating their strangle hold on mainland China. There was a real need for leadership and moral clarity, to provide an alternative to authoritarianism.

So an extraordinary collection of historians and leaders of historical societies got together to launch American Heritage. 

“What is needed in America today is a new appreciation and understanding of our American heritage and its advantages over the ways of totalitarianism and dictatorship,” the publishers wrote as their mission in the first issue.

Allen Nevins, longtime Chairman of our Editorial Advisory Committee, also observed in that first issue that there was a real need for “a renewal of our most precious possession, faith in the national ideal.” (Nevins was a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history.)

We have heeded their words, and in this anniversary issue turned to look at American fundamentals. We asked over two dozen leading historians to help us remind readers of the insights of our Founding Fathers, the expansion of the American ideal by Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, of the courage of Suffragettes and Civil Rights leaders who marched in the streets to stand up for their rights. And many others who  helped make America great, or illustrated its ideals in their actions.

As the famed jurist Learned Hand observed in American Heritage, “The use of history is to tell us what we are, for at our birth we are nearly empty vessels and we become what our traditions pour into us.” Those traditions matter, we are remained every day in the ignorant blogging and authoritarian ravings that have crept into our daily discourse.

We must do better. “The age of our country’s achievement is not ended but only just begun,” as the playwright and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Sherwood noted in American Heritage.