What Made America Great

What made America great? Since many of our citizens yearn to make America great again (as if we aren't now), we thought it useful to try to define a core of what makes our nation special. What better way to celebrate our 75 years of telling the American story?

It seems a simple question, but the answer is frustratingly complex. Where to begin? With the current focus on America 250, we looked for something new to say about the Revolution. 

that we have tried to define for the last year as we “We must all hang together... or most assuredly we shall all hang separately,” Benjamin Franklin remarked as signers were putting their names on the Declaration of Independence.

At least there was no social media at the time to make their perilous action even more challenging. “When there are so many forces dedicated to dividing us, how can we hang together,” asks Walter Isaacson in his most recent book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written.

“One way,” he answers, “is by reflecting on our fundamental principles.” We came to a similar conclusion when trying to decide what theme to use in an issue in our 75th Anniversary

American Heritage was founded five years after the end of World War II. That year the Soviet Union had just tested their first atomic bomb and the Cold War was heating up. There was a real need to An extraordinary collection of historians and heads of historical societies got together 

So it is not a coincidence that our former editors, members of “the Greatest Generation” themselves, published so many essays on World War II – an incredible 1,521 essays on the war, in fact.

The Soviet Union's successful test of an atomic bomb in 1949 heightened the sense of an ongoing arms race between the two superpowers. 

There was a real need for “a renewal of our most precious possession, faith in the national ideal," as Allan Nevins wrote in the magazine. Nevins was Chair of our Editorial Advisory Committee and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history, wrote.

Why We Care About History

“The use of history is to tell us what we are,” observed the famed jurist Learned Hand in American Heritage in 1953, “for at our birth we are nearly empty vessels and we become what our traditions pour into us.”

David McCullough pointed out that “people in the past

The playwright and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Sherwood wrote in American Heritage 1953 that “the age of our country’s achievement is not ended but only just begun.