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April 2023
1min read


In the long generation from its first issue until this winter day in 1983, the February/March issue of A MERICAN H ERITAGE surely must be the finest, most nearly perfect of them all. For variety, literary excellence, the scope and scale of learning offered, the pleasure of reading, the graphics, the design—all, it seems to me, have come together in a memorable treasure of publishing. The work of that forgotten photographer and his San Francisco earthquake photographs; the essay on the Ouija boards of my childhood; the unbelievable but authentic manuscript of one family’s odyssey in Kansas in the 187Os; Jacques Barzun’s essay on William James; those touching paintings of artists in their studios, and all the rest left me enthralled, impressed, and nearly stunned with appreciation for this masterpiece of periodical production.

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Stories published from "June/july 1983"

Authored by: R. D. Eno

Thousands of them sided with Great Britain, only to become the wandering children of the American Revolution

Authored by: David Michaelis

If he’d been the closest companion of the president of IBM, you might happen across his name in a privately printed memoir. But LeMoyne Billings was John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s best friend from Choate to the White House—and that makes him part of history.

Authored by: The Editors

Most surveys of American painting begin in New England in the eighteenth century, move westward to the Rockies in the nineteenth, and return to New York in the twentieth. Now we’ll have to redraw the map .

Authored by: John Brooks

Our fascination with categorizing ourselves was fed in 1949 by a famous essay and chart that divided us by taste into different strata of culture. Now the man who invented these classifications brings us up to date.

Authored by: Fred Kaplan

THE BIRTH OF THE RAND CORPORATION During World War II, America discovered that scientists were needed to win it—and to win any future war. That’s why RAND came into being, the first think tank and the model for all the rest.

Authored by: Victor Salvatore

Abner Doubleday had an eventful life, but as far as we know, he never gave a thought to the game with which his name is so firmly linked

Authored by: John Thorn

A portfolio of rare photographs recalls baseball’s rough-and-tumble vintage era

Authored by: John W. Ripley

… illuminated by the hand-tinted slides that helped make it a hit

Authored by: Donald Carroll

One of the most ingenious and least known rescue missions of World War II was engineered by a young American dandy, Varian Fry, who shepherded to safety hundreds of European intellectuals wanted by the Nazis

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