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Culture
Nashville’s rewards go beyond music.
These days, airports try to evoke some of the flavor of the communities they serve, and, in Nashville, the airport corridor leading from the arrival and departure gates is enlivened by walls full of linear posters, at once stark and vigorous, of country music stars. They bear the unmistakable stamp of Hatch Show Prints, one of the oldest working letterpress printshops in the country, still flourishing in the city’s downtown.
Was the great Orson Welles possibly not all that great? Is there something coarse and generic about one of our most beloved war memorials? Which of our Founding Fathers deserves better of us? Which of our painters? For the eighth year in a row, historians and journalists assess the ever-shifting reputations of people and events, and once again affirm that history is never history - that it is the most volatile, passionate, and living of pursuits.
African-American Comedian Baseball Statistic Celebrity Trial Children’s Book Writer Conspiracy Theory
What do all these baby boomers really have in common?
It’s easy to get silly when you start generalizing about generations.
Are we learning from the past? And are we honoring it?
How does a great republic sustain itself? How do we keep the democratic ideal before us in a world preoccupied with instant gratification, with allegiance to tribe and creed above all else?
1914–2005
As this issue was going to press, we learned that Oliver Jensen had died.
Recently, a company tried to harness history by resurrecting a great American motorcycle. What happened is a cautionary tale about business, memory, and the seductive urge to recapture the past.
The city of the departed Dodgers, of Henry Ward Beecher, Walt Whitman, and Coney Island, is ready for its next act as a world-class tourist destination.
Nathan Ward says in his essay on Brooklyn in this issue that one in seven American families has its roots in that borough’s soil.
The Queen Mary II, the latest in a line of great Cunarders, aims to command the seas.
There’s a lot more to the often-overlooked mid-coastal Maine than lobster. But the lobster is amazing.
A humble sport in a stylish capital
In the 30s, I played some rough-and-tumble stickball in New York City—on the East Side, the West Side, uptown, downtown, in Chinatown and Little Italy, surrounded by pushcarts and cooking smells.
A Pony Express stop for our time
In sunshine or darkness, good weather or bad, whether I’m wide awake or dead tired, the most beautiful roadside sight for me is a sign that says WE NEVER CLOSE.
My mother, a lifelong New Yorker, often guided me on what I thought of as ghost walks of New York. Not, however, to search for haunted houses or to attempt communion with the dead, but simply as a remembrance of what had gone before.
She played opposite the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera and hasn’t slowed down since.
This is a journalist’s list. My reading (and knowledge) is greatly influenced by the events of the day, the time, the era. My reading and my work are often one and the same. That is one of the best things about being a writer, but it may not be ideal for list-making.
How does one choose a list of great historical films? Is the emphasis on great or historical? And how far should one be willing to compromise with either?
In his kaleidoscopic novel U.S.A., a trilogy published between 1930 and 1936, John Dos Passos offered a descriptive line that has always stayed with me.
On a high Vermont hill, where Robert Frost liked to absorb the sound of trees, he and I talked through many afternoons, speaking, as Frost put it, “to some purpose.” He held forth on astronomy, mortality, baseball, poetry, and prose, displaying a command of phrase that I have n
The most indispensable photographs show us who we are: the formal portraits of our great-grandparents as newly arrived immigrants and our own parents on their wedding day; the candid snapshots of our youthful selves and of our own children at moments in time gone forever.
When American Heritage magazine debuted 50 years ago, its founders explicitly intended it to make history lively and accessible to a larger audience.
“Popular culture” is not the opposite of or the alternative to something called “high culture.” It is not degraded, debased, simple, or undisciplined. Nor is it defined primarily by its mass appeal or commercial values.
Few periods in the history of this country can match the impact of the years between 1917 and 1941. In less than a generation, America experienced the first large-scale dispatch of U.S.
The assignment—to select 10 books suitable for a lay reader that cover American history between the Constitution and the 1850s—sounds easier than it is.
From The Souls of Black Folk to The New Jim Crow, these texts are essential for anyone trying to understand the black experience in America.
Editor's Note: Amid nationwide protests over racial injustice and a resurgent Black Lives Matter movement, understanding the experience of African Americans in the U.S. is more relevant than ever.
In 1804, an obscure English sailor named John Davis published an imaginative account of the seventeenth-century romance between Pocahontas and Captain John Smith and called it The First Settlers of Virginia, An Historical Novel.
Biography is an almost writer-proof art. Structure and raison d’être are taken care of in advance. The form—someone is born, does stuff, dies—is as rigid and soothing as the sonnet.
This fiftieth anniversary issue of American Heritage was born on the Garden City, New York, railroad-station platform.
An early arrest proved no deterrent to a thug named Gotti.