July 2021

My father has a memory of my great-grandmother Rose that he shares from time to time. He was outside playing with his sister Kathleen one day when she called them back home. She led them to a small room and dug out a big photo album. My dad was sure that she was going to make them sit there and go through old family photos for hours. A young boy at the time, he squirmed and looked longingly out the window at his Cape Cod summer day.

But Grandma Rose quickly flipped to the very back of the album and pulled out a stack of carefully folded, faded newspapers. One after another, she opened them up to the Help Wanted section. There, she handed him ad after ad marked with big block letters: no Irish need apply.

Contents

In the Beginning: 1607–1798     
The Young Republic, 1815–60     
High Tide and Reaction: 1885–1930     
The Third World Comes to the U.S: 1965–90    

Editor’s Note: James Reston Jr. is the author of 18 books including his just published novel about 9/11, The 19th Hijacker. Mr. Reston wrote the cover article for our June issue on the Vietnam Wall and is a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Richard Whittle is the author of The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey and Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution. 

On that terrible day of September 11, twenty years ago, the revolt of the passengers on Flight 93 resulting in the plane hijacked by al-Qaeda terrorists crashing in Shanksville, Pennsylvania is rightly celebrated as one of the greatest heroic events in American history.

Editor's note: Timothy M. Gay is the Pulitzer-nominated author of two books on WWII. His first article on the U.S. civilian response to the Nazi U-boat threat appeared in American Heritage in 2019.

Editor’s Note: We were disappointed when individuals protesting racial injustice last May spray-painted monuments in Lafayette Park, as we wrote at the time, since the vandalized statues of Lafayette, Kosciusko, and Von Steuben depicted young revolutionaries who came to this country to fight for democratic rights. So for this issue we asked historian Harlow Giles Unger to remind us why the Marquis de Lafayette was so important in the early history of our nation. Portions of this essay appeared in his delightful biography, Lafayette.