American History

Will there be no Jackie Kennedy for Hotel Pennsylvania?

Hotel Pennsylvania in Midtown Manhattan has been slated for destruction for the past 20 years which leaves New York City preservations with little hope as the powers capable of saving the iconic structure stand idle. Are they right to let it go?

JFK Writes about Our Nation’s Memory

John F. Kennedy | Winter 2010

In 1962, the president wrote for American Heritage that the study of history is no mere pastime, but the means by which a nation establishes its sense of identity and purpose.

Our Times... and Mine

Dan Rather | May/June 1996

A newsman returns to a classic work by a famous predecessor and finds that Mark Sullivan’s vanished America has something to tell us.

History in the Raw

Geoffrey C. Ward | June/July 1986

When I was in school in the 1950s, audio-visual aids were still pretty primitive: jittery 16-mm movies shown on a battered pull-down screen, using an ancient projector whose eccentricities were understood only by the pale initiates of the AV club.

History Still Matters

Bill Moyers | December 1985

A distinguished journalist and former presidential adviser says that, to find the meaning of any news story, we must dig for its roots in the past.

I am fascinated by what I see in the rearview mirror of experience. The future, being a mystery, excites, but the past instructs.

Everything You Never Knew About American History And Were Afraid You’d Be Asked

December 1976

Is History Dead?

The Editors | December 1976

NO, SAY THREE AMERICAN HISTORIANS. BUT THE PATIENT IS AILING AND THEY THINK THEY KNOW WHY AND WHAT TO PRESCRIBE.

Should The Historian Make Moral Judgments?

Henry Steele Commager | February 1966

By no means, said W. H. Prescott. Absolutely, said Lord Acton. The question remains hard—and intriguing

In 1847 that Boston gentleman and man of letters William Hickling Prescott concluded twenty years of labor on the history of Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella and on the conquests of Mexico and Peru.

The Search For A Usable Past

Henry Steele Commager | February 1965

A distinguished historian describes how America, suddenly thrust into nationhood without a history of its own, set out to create one. And what a splendid achievement it was!

On History

John F. Kennedy | February 1964

"Americans are united by their history and by a faith in progress, justice, and freedom," writes President Kennedy

Subscribe to American History

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.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

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.