Editor's Note: Yanek Mieczkowski is a presidential historian and author of Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment: The Race for Space and World Prestige, and The Routledge Historical Atlas of Presidential Elections. He teaches at the Florida Institute of Technology.
On May 15, 1943, the Saturday Evening Post, whose weekly circulation during the war came close to cracking four million, ran a riveting story. A few weeks earlier, an undersized Stinson Voyager piloted by a 60-year-old Civil Air Patrol (CAP) volunteer had come shrieking out of a fog bank a scant thousand feet above the Atlantic and caught a U-boat captain napping on the ocean’s surface.
“It was the last thing that captain ever knew. A husky demolition bomb burst sprang on his conning tower, blasting captain, crew and U-boat clear out of the water,” the article gushed.
Many readers no doubt shared the breathless account with family, friends, and coworkers. “Some old guy in a tiny plane sinking a fierce German U-boat?! Take that, Adolf!”
Editor's Note: Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of S&P Global, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, described by Business Week as hailed as “the best history of oil ever written.” More recently, he published The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations.
Editor's Note: Elisabeth Griffith is the author of two acclaimed books on women's history, Formidable: American Women and the Fight for Equality: 1920–2020 and In Her Own Right: the Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She has a PhD in history, and publishes a blog at Pink Threads on Substack.
On November 14, 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges walked through an angry crowd into a school emptied of other students.
“Driving up I could see the crowd, but living in New Orleans, I actually thought it was Mardi Gras,” Ruby recalled as an adult. “There was a large crowd of people outside of the school. They were throwing things and shouting, and that sort of goes on in New Orleans at Mardi Gras.”
American Heritage is published by the National Historical Society (NHS), a 501c(3) nonprofit with 65,000 active members based in Washington, DC.
The Society was formed to “foster, promote, and encourage interest in and the study of American history and culture, support research, and develop media to connect all Americans to their shared heritage” and “encourage the teaching of American history and civics in schools and universities, and promote civic literacy.”
NHS continues and build on the 75-year tradition of American Heritage Magazine by illuminating our nation’s past in new ways, across multiple media, to reach academic and non-academic audiences alike.
Donations to the National Historical Society are tax deductible. Its EIN number is 88-2148184.