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Bruce Catton

Bruce Catton (1899 – 1978) was the Founding Editor of American Heritage and arguably the most prolific and popular of all Civil War historians. He wrote an astonishing 167 articles for American Heritage, and won a Pulitzer Prize for history in 1954 for A Stillness at Appomattox, his study of the final campaign of the war in Virginia.

Catton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, from President Gerald Ford, in 1977, the year before his death.

Articles by this Author

A Correction, June 1968 | Vol. 19, No. 4
The Other Side Camp
Fifty years ago America went into World War I—singing. Irving Berlin, who put some of the songs upon our lips, recalls for American Heritage those gallant and somehow marvelously innocent days.
When he was reunited with his wife in 1867, Davis' face showed the strains of four years of war and two in prison. For a man of warmth and tenderness who had never wanted the responsibilities of high political office, it had been a cruel ordeal.
Concerned lest history overlook their triumphs, veterans of the Army of the Cumberland had them writ large -- on a canvas five hundred feet long. of the Cumberland had them writ large—on a canvas five hundred feet long
All the old rules seemed to be vanishing in the Twenties. In exchange came a strange new world both gaudy and sad
Heritage For Today, June 1965 | Vol. 16, No. 4
A Union veteran talks of life in a prison camp: it was bad, yet there were times one could recall happily
When Harry Truman was President of the United States he kept on his desk a little sign with the reminder: “The buck stops here.” This was his way of telling himself that when the responsibility for decision conies to a President, he has to meet it all alone. He can ask for all kinds of advice, and any amount of briefing, but he has to make up his mind by himself. Once in a generation or so his decisions send powerful echoes down the years. They may take the country along a path never before followed, enlarge the powers of the American government itself, or commit the whole nation to a policy or a program that will have permanent and vital effect. At such moments the President has to have vision, courage, and a sense of historic mission. To illustrate the matter, we consider below five moments in time in which a President made a decision whose consequences to the republic still endure.
From the start, Niagara has been over publicized, but somehow its authentic majesty has survived
William Ashley was largely responsible for the development of that most glittering of the West’s romantic figures, the mountain man—the free trapper who explored the western wilderness at imminent peril of his life.