August 2017

We can feel significant satisfaction in the quality of historical scholarship being published today, considering the seven books nominated for this year's George Washington Book Prize. Each of the seven in its own way is an important contribution to the large body of writing about the Founding Era. And a pleasure to read!

By arrangement with the organizers of the Prize, we have created a special issue of American Heritage with excerpts from each of the seven finalists, enabling us to create an impressive  lineup of essays.

The George Washington Book Prize is one of the nation’s largest and most prestigious literary awards. Now in its tenth year, the $50,000 prize honors our First President by recognizing the year’s best new books on early American history. The Prize is administered by Mount Vernon, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, and the C.V. Starr Center at Washington College.

It’s winter of 1939, and the big, bamboo-style letters on the sides of a building at Broadway and 49th Street blaze forth the name “CHIN LEE” late into the night. Around them, the words “DINING,” “DANCING” and “NO COVER CHARGE” are spelled out by blinking yellow bulbs. The entrance is on 49th Street, under a movie-theater-style awning that lures you up a brightly-lit flight of stairs to a coat check, a crowd of people milling about and the clatter of plates and the noise of a frantic jazz band.

Today, Arthur Clarke is remembered as a writer of science fiction and the screenplay for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. But Clarke was also a serious futurist and one of the first writers to suggest that rockets could be used for communication, not just military purposes.