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Westward Expansion
A present-day adventurer canoes the Upper Missouri to find that time and fortune have erased signs of its later history, restoring the wilderness the Corps of Discovery penetrated nearly 200 years ago
The little-appreciated U.S. public-land survey not only opened up our frontier but made possible our freedoms.
More than two decades before the Revolution broke out, a group of Americans voted on a scheme to unite the colonies. For the rest of his life, Benjamin Franklin thought it could have prevented the war. It didn’t, but it did give us our Constitution.
Were Miranda and Prospero among the first white people in the New World?
The Hawaii of centuries long past emerges from the landscapes crossed by its ancient trails.
The past presses close to the surface on the island of Hawaii, the southernmost in the archipelago, the one they call the Big Island.
Thomas Berger, the author of a classic novel of the American West, speaks about its long-awaited sequel, and about what is to be learned in the challenging territory that lies between history and fiction.
In 1992, American Heritage asked various historians, artists, and writers to name their candidate for best historical novel.
Strictly speaking, the high-spirited gathering was a harvest festival, not a thanksgiving.
AFTER CENTURIES OF CONFLICT OVER THEIR RIGHTS AND POWERS, Indian tribes now increasingly make and enforce their own laws, often answerable to no one in the United States government. Is this the rebirth of their ancient independence or a new kind of legalized segregation?
The infant survivor of Wounded Knee spent her life in desperate pursuit of a heritage that always eluded her.
Zintkála Nuni was four
Why Americans should mourn the death of a British financial institution
It is not often that even the most ardent believer in capitalism mourns the passing of an economic institution, unless, of course, he or she has personally lost money as a result.
It belonged to Taos’ most influential family until well into the 20th century, but this unadorned adobe hacienda speaks of the earliest days of Spanish occupation of the Southwest.
In 1804, a Pueblo Indian sold his four-room adobe house in the farming community of Taos, New Mexico, to Don Severino Martínez, a Spanish trader.
The most celebrated of all Indian leaders gets his first new biography in more than half a century.
In the autumn of 1884, a young Lakota named Standing Bear, a student at the Carlisle Indian School, was granted permission to travel into Philadelphia and attend a stage show.
First heard just a century ago at the Chicago fair, Frederick Jackson Turner’s epochal essay on the Western frontier expressed a conflict in the American psyche that still tears at us.
This country’s long, acrimonious observance of the Columbian quincentenary is finally over, but it won’t be soon forgotten.
The first caravans lumbered across 2000 miles of dangerous, inhospitable wilderness in 1843, the year of the Great Migration. To a surprising degree, it’s still possible to follow something very like their route.
A couple of miles south of Marysville, Kansas, not far from the east bank of the Big Blue River, lies one of the most moving places on the Oregon Trail.
A novelist joins his ancestor on a trip West and discovers in her daily travails an intimate view of a tremendous national migration.
For the past several days, I have been traveling from Dover, New Jersey toward Fort Washington, Ohio with my great-great-great-grandmother.
Retracing the pioneer trail in Mormon Utah
On my first visit to Gilgal Garden, a back-yard collection of folk sculpture in Salt Lake City, a Mormon friend who shares my taste for the unusual took my picture.
In the fall of 1960, a novelty-song about Custer’s Last Stand climbed its way inexplicably onto the Billboard charts.
Here are some interesting facts about his epic voyage and its impact.
WAS HE REALLY THE FIRST? IF HE SAILED FOR SPAIN, WHY DO ITALIANS MAKE SUCH A FUSS ABOUT HIS BIRTHDAY? HOW COME AMERICA ISN’T NAMED FOR HIM? WHY IS HE BEING CALLED A VILLAIN NOW?
How Creek Indian number 1501 repaid a debt
In August 1902, a 12-year-old farm boy named Thomas Gilcrease, being one-eighth Creek Indian on his mother’s side, received a 160-acre allotment in the land of the Creek Nation, one of the Five Civilized Tribes, which occupied what yet remained of Indian Territory in America.
THE MOVIES, THE WARS, AND THE TEAPOT DOME: A journey of a hundred miles on a Wyoming interstate turns up the true stories behind the powerful Western myths.
My wife and I are on the inter-state, headed north toward Johnson County, Wyoming.
“Why hasn't the stereotype faded away as real cowboys become less and less typical of Western life? Because we can't or won't do without it, obviously.”
On the 150th anniversary of Texan independence, we trace the fierce negotiations that brought the republic into the union.
From the moment he entered the White House in March 1829, Andrew Jackson of Tennessee turned a cold and calculating eye on Texas.
For many children who accompanied their parents west across the continent in the 1840s and '50s, the journey was a supreme adventure.
The historian Francis Parkman, strolling around Independence, Missouri in 1846, remarked upon the “multitude of healthy children’s faces … peeping out from under the covers of the wagons.” Two decades later, a traveler there wrote of husbands packing up “sunb
An exploration into the exploration of America