Literature

Alfred A. Knopf | April 1977

One of America's most distinguished publishers writes of his personal and professional friendship with the famed historian, Samuel Eliot Morison.

Dark Carnival

Michael Lesy | October 1976

THE DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION OF FLOYD COLLINS

The “down” Years 1972-74

George D. Aiken | August 1976

A Senator’s View

The Siege Of Vicksburg

Richard Wheeler | June 1976

The Therapy of Distance

Daniel J. Boorstin | June 1976

The broad expanse of ocean that separated Plymouth from Mother England helped create a novel experiment in democracy that grew as the American colonies expanded.

”years Came Along One After The Other …”

Emma Mitchell New | December 1976

IT WAS LIKE THIS FOR OUR GREAT-GRANDMOTHERS

The Man Who Named America

George R. Stewart | April 1975

Esprit De Corporation

February 1975

In the booming 1920’s, when business was nearly America’s national religion and advertising its Holy Writ, the Mather Poster Company of Chicago designed a set of texts to inspire greater peaks of productivity from the workingman.

Melville Meets Hawthorne

John A. Phillips | December 1975

How a champagne picnic on Monument Mountain led to a profound revision of Moby Dick — and disenchantment

A little group of American men of affairs and letters met along with their ladies on the morning of August 5, 1850, to hike up Monument Mountain, one of the more prominent features of the landscape surrounding Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Scott & Zelda

E. M. Halliday | October 1974

HOW TWO FAMOUS FIGURES OF THE TWENTIES GREW UP, MET, AND FELL IN LOVE

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. …” It was an odd way for a rich and world-famous young writer to end his third novel— The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The Ordeal Of Thomas Hutchinson

Bernard Bailyn | April 1974

BETWEEN KING AND COUNTRY

A Letter From Lord Macaulay

February 1974

Crowder Tales

Nixon Smiley | October 1973

The Unexpected Mrs. Stowe

David McCullough | August 1973

Harriet Beecher Stowe, an extraordinary member of an extraordinary family, always claimed that God wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin

She had been brought up to make herself useful. And always it suited her.

T.r.’s Last Adventure

Joseph L. Gardner | June 1973

FDR’s Extra Burden

Bernard Asbell | June 1973

WHAT POLIOMYELITIS MEANT TO A POLITICAL CAREER

This article is an excerpt from a new book on Franklin Delano Roosevelt recently published by Doubleday & Company. It is being publicized as The F.D.R. Memoir “as written by Bernard Asbell. ” Mr.

Beyond Mother’s Knee

Elaine Kendall | June 1973

The prevailing Colonial feeling toward female education was unanimously negative. Learning to read was the first feminist triumph.

Could I have died a martyr in the cause, and thus ensured its success, I could have blessed the faggot and hugged the stake.” The cause was state support for female education, the would-be Saint Joan was Emma Willard, and the rhetorical standards of the 1820’

Dorothy Thompson:

Bernard A. Weisberger | June 1973

A Legend in Her Time

by Bessie Rowland James. Rutgers University Press, 447 pp. $15.00

A Brush Hollow Tale

Mcgarry Morley | April 1973

Common Sense

Bernard Bailyn | December 1973

The Most Uncommon Pamphlet of the Revolution

Men of the Revolution—7. Thomas Paine

Richard M. Ketchum | October 1972

Common Sense was a bestseller and turned the tide of public feeling toward independence, but for its author fame was followed by ingratitude.

The whole history of America affords examples of men who fitted precisely the needs of a particular moment, only to be cast aside, forgotten or traduced when the tide of events they created or manipulated waned and time passed them by.

The National Police Gazette

Gene Smith | October 1972

A Little Visit to the Lower Depths via

No one, it has been said, ever really learns to accept the fact that it was a coupling by his parents that produced him. The novelist Louis Auchincloss extends this and says we can never believe in the sexuality of our grandparents.

A Dearth of Heroes

Robert Penn Warren | October 1972

Humanity, Said Edgar Allan Poe, Is Divided Into Men, Women, And Margaret Fuller

Joseph Jay Deiss | August 1972

Poe’s witticism was not meant kindly, but it was actually a compliment. Without doubt Margaret Fuller stood first among women of the nineteenth century.

A Mere Woman

Gene Gleason | December 1972

A shy Yankee named Hannah Adams never thought of herself as liberated, but she was our first professional female writer.

If they should care to, the leaders of Women’s Liberation may add Miss Hannah Adams, born in 1755, to their roster of distinguished women. She was probably the first native American woman to earn a living as a professional writer.

Picnics Long Ago

June 1971

If it rained, the painters failed to record it

Food tastes better outdoors, and it always has. Nowadays this rule, which every child learns early in life, can be seen in operation at tailgate parties at football games or wherever spectator sports are in season.

In Memoriam: Allan Nevins

Bruce Catton | June 1971

The longtime adviser to American Heritage wrote history not simply as a means of talking with other historians, but in order to talk to the general reader.

They say a tree is best measured when it is down. Allan Nevins is gone, at last, although he seemed imperishable, and we at AMERICAN HERITAGE feel a poignant sense of loss.

John Faulkner’s Vanishing South

Redding S. Sugg, Jr. | April 1971

John Faulkner, like his more famous brother William, was a novelist, but he was also a painter.

Of Noble Warriors And Maidens Chaste

Irene M. Patten | April 1971

Oriana Weems, Alma Lamour, Caroline Fitzhugh, Seth Rawbon, Netley Shiplake, Mordaunt—none of these improbable names is likely to mean anything to the modern reader, but to the generation that lived through the Civil War, and sighed and wept over the novels th

The Paper Trust

Bernard A. Weisberger | April 1971

To begin with, the Presidential libraries do not look like what they are. Each one is, in fact, a miniature Office of Public Records.

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Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brinkley, Douglas

Douglas Brinkley, a distinguished professor of history at Rice University and Contributing Editor of American Heritage, has written more than 20 books, most recently The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (Harper 2009) and The Reagan Diaries (HarperCollins 2007). Brinkley earned his B.A from Ohio State University University in 1982, and his Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 1989.

Catton, Bruce

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.

Commager, Henry Steele

A longtime member of the editorial advisory board of AMERICAN HERITAGE, Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998) taught at New York University, Columbia, and Amherst College, and authored more than forty books. He first gained attention in 1930 as co-author, with Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, of The Growth of the American Republic, which became a standard textbook for decades. His anthology Documents of American History (1938) remained a widely used collection of primary sources for many years.

Dickson, Paul

Paul Dickson is the author of more than 55 nonfiction books and hundreds of magazine articles. Although he has written on a variety of subjects from ice cream to kite flying to electronic warfare, he now concentrates on writing about the American language, baseball and 20th century history. Bestselling books include: Baseball’s Greatest Quotations, The Hidden Language of Baseball, and The Joy of Keeping Score.

Dolin, Eric Jay

Eric Jay Dolin is a bestselling author of popular books on American history, maritime history, and the environment. His works include Fur, Fortune, And Empire, a history of America's fur trade, Black Flags, Blue Waters, about the history of pirating in America, and Leviathan, about the history of whaling in the U.S. His more recent book is A Furious Sky, which retraces 500 years of hurricanes in America and the impact they had on the nation's development.

Eisenhower, John D.

John D. Eisenhower, the son of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is a retired United States Army officer and the author of several books on military history. He served as the U.S. Ambassador to Belgium from 1969 to 1971.

Ellis, Joseph J.

Joseph J. Ellis, winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in History for Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Knopf 2000), is the Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College whose work focuses on the lives and times of the founders of the United States of America.

Fleming, Thomas

Thomas Fleming is a longtime contributor to American Heritage and former president of the Society of American Historians.

Flexner, James Thomas

James Thomas Flexner (1908-2003) was most famous for his extensive writings on American art history and a four-volume biography of George Washington, for which he won a special Pulitzer citation. Flexner's other historical biographies include the one-volume Washington: The Indispensable Man, The Young Hamilton, Mohawk Baronet (Sir William Johnson, 1st Baronet), and The Traitor and the Spy: Benedict Arnold and John Andre.

Foner, Eric

Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, has served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society of American Historians. One of the foremost experts on the Civil War, Slavery, Reconstruction, and Abraham Lincoln, Foner's most recent book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, published in the fall of 2010, won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2011.

Gates, Henry Louis

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, and the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. He recently completed The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader (Basic Civitas Books, 2012), a collection of essays on history, culture, and African-American genealogy. Gates has hosted several PBS television miniseries, including the history and travel program Wonders of the African World and the biographical African American Lives and Faces of America.

Gordon, John Steele

John Steele Gordon has been a frequent contributor to American Heritage and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author most recently of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (HarperCollins 2004). Gordon's writing concentrates on business and financial history, and his 1999 book, The Great Game: The Emergence of Wall Street as a World Power, 1653-2000, was adapted into a two-hour CNBC special.

Gordon-Reed, Annette

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History, Professor of History and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.

Holzer, Harold

Harold Holzer, a frequent contributor and winner of a 2005 Lincoln Prize for Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President (Simon & Schuster 2006), has written more than 40 books about the 16th president. He currently chairs The Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation and was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush in 2008. Holzer, educated at the City University of New York, first worked as a newspaper editor for The Manhattan Tribune, served as a political campaign press secretary for Congresswoman Bella S.

Lukacs, John

John Lukacs served as a Professor of History at Chestnut Hill College from 1947 to 1994, and is the noted author of over 30 books including:Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century, The Legacy of the Second World War and The Future of History in 2011.

Maier, Pauline

Pauline Maier was the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American History at MIT. She primarily wrote on the American Revolution and Early Republic. Her book, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, was named as a top book of 1997 by the New York Times Book Review and was a finalist in General Nonfiction for the National Book Critics' Circle Award. Her book Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 won the prestigious George Washington Book Prize in 2010.

McCullough, David

David McCullough is an author, narrator, historian, and lecturer. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and Francis Parkman Prizes.

McPherson, James M.

James M. McPherson, the George Henry Davis ’86 Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, is perhaps America’s foremost living Civil War scholar. Among his books are his one-volume history of the war, Battle Cry of Freedom, Lincoln and The Second American Revolution, and For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, winner of the Lincoln Prize in 1998.

Reynolds, David S.

David S. Reynolds is a literary critic and historian who has written fifteen books about American history, literature and culture. These include Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times, John Brown, Abolitionist, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography, Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson and Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America.

Schlesinger, Arthur

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007) was a historian, author, and political adviser who served as Special Assistant to President John Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. Schlesinger won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Age of Jackson. In 1966, Schlesinger won another Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. He was honored with a National Humanities Medal and a Four Freedoms Award before his death in 2007.

Tuchman, Barbara W.

Barbara Tuchman (1912 – 1989) was an American historian and author who first became known for her best-selling book The Guns of August, a history of the prelude to and first month of World War I, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1963. She won a second Pulitzer for Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1972).

Watkins, T. H.

One of the foremost chroniclers of the American West, T. H. Watkins was an editor at American Heritage for six years and a long-time contributor. He also served as Editor of Wilderness magazine for fifteen years, and as Wallace Stegner Distinguished Professor of Western American Studies at Montana State University.

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