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For generations, the name was as closely associated with Christmas as Santa Claus.
The very American career of the card game you can learn in 10 minutes and work on for the rest of your life
American Heritage’s editors and contributors survey the historical offerings of recent months, and pick their favorites from a field wide enough to include movies, restaurants, furniture, cocktails, hotels, cookies, wristwatches—and artifacts retrieved from the statero
It was a story so disturbing that we all still remember it. But what if it wasn’t true?
In the paper’s morning edition for March 27, 1964, The New York Times ran one of the most indelible leads in its 155-year history.
Four million Americans came into the world that year. Here are some who have already made their mark on 2006.
Jeff Bezos, January 12: Founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com; he was Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 1999.
In 1964, the most popular movie star in America had a license to kill from the British government.
James Bond hit U.S. shores in 1964 with an impact that fitted the description Bond’s armorer, “Q,” gave of his .32-caliber Walther PPK: “Like a brick through a plate-glass window.” Goldfinger was number two in the U.S.
Just as the year changed the nation, so its World Series changed American sports.
On what they still called their “home screens,” Americans got to watch the future.
The Beatles’ appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in February 1964 remains one of the most watched television events in history. Those who saw it remember it almost as clearly as they remember the near-continuous coverage of the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath the previous November.
Cassius Clay Gives a Thrashing to Sonny Liston
Viewing a transformation that still affects all of us—through the prism of a single year
The explosion at the Army Math Center blew in the window near my laboratory desk.
On Monday, August 24, 1970, I was a graduate student in organic chemistry at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. My research laboratory was in the chemistry building, and that morning, I rode over on my bicycle to find broken glass everywhere.
How sex, rum, World War II, and the brand-new state of Hawaii ignited a fad that has never quite ended.
Kennedy looked out the limo’s back window and kept waving and smiling, despite the pain he must have felt.
How I protected military files from Cold War spies
In the summer of 1961, I was assigned temporary duty from Headquarters Company, 3d Medical Tank Battalion, 33d Armor, Fort Knox, Kentucky, to Camp Breckenridge, Morganfield, Kentucky, as billeting officer.
Prelude to a symphony and a scandal
We were in Washington one may evening in 1972 to attend a concert at the Kennedy Center. Our daughter Joan’s school orchestra, the Interlochen Arts Academy Symphony, from Interlochen, Michigan, was performing, and she would be playing the bassoon.
Her son had her committed. She said it was so he could get his hands on her money. Now, 130 years after this bitter and controversial drama, a trove of letters—long believed destroyed—sheds new light on it.
The creator of the immensely popular new Western discusses what makes it truly new.
The city of his birth sent Richard Schickel off on a lifelong career. Here’s what the film critic and historian discovered when that job brought him back home.
How a Neapolitan street food became the most successful immigrant of all
This is the twentieth issue of American Heritage that we have given over to travel.
How lucky to have Central Park as your back yard
It has been the received wisdom of the suburban age that kids grow up better in the country, where there is access to fresh air, trees, wildlife (although not too much of it, please), and other good things.
Last Thanksgiving Day brought with it sad news: An obituary in The New York Times told of the death of Joseph J. Thorndike, Jr.
How Pat Boone seduced this rock critic
Pat Boone Says: You Don’t Have to Wiggle
Wildlife, Shells, and Thomas Edison’s Laboratory
Sinclair Lewis Wins the Nobel for literature.
The New York City Fire Museum is in a century-old firehouse on Spring Street.
An ambitious young magazine editor and a tormented photographer together discovered a Marilyn Monroe who nobody knew.
The people who stand ready to trade their lives for ours are part of a tradition that goes back 400 years.