Battle of Little Bighorn

Nathaniel Philbrick | Spring 2010

Fate brought Custer and Sitting Bull together one bloody June evening at the Little Bighorn—and marked the end of the Wild West.

An Interview with the Author of "Little Big Man"

Andrew S. Ward | May/June 1999

Thomas Berger, the author of a classic novel of the American West, speaks about its long-awaited sequel, and about what is to be learned in the challenging territory that lies between history and fiction.

In 1992, American Heritage asked various historians, artists, and writers to name their candidate for best historical novel.

A Road They Did Not Know

Larry McMurtry | February/March 1999

Our greatest Western novelist deciphers Crazy Horse, Custer, and the hard year of the Little Bighorn

Into the Face of History

James S. Brust, M.d. | November 1992

Starting with a single, haunting battlefield image, an amateur photo detective managed to reconstruct a forgotten photographer’s life and uncover a treasure of Indian portraits.

I had waited six months to see it. A long-time collector, I loved to roam the monthly swap meet in Long Beach, California near my home.

The Little Bighorn

Andrew S. Ward | April 1992

In the fall of 1960, a novelty-song about Custer’s Last Stand climbed its way inexplicably onto the Billboard charts.

Echoes of the Little Bighorn

David Humphreys Miller | June 1971

No battle in American history has won more attention than the relatively insignificant defeat at the Little Bighorn River in 1876.

Last Ghastly Moments At The Little Bighorn

John Stands-in-timber | April 1966

A Cheyenne historian whose grandfather was in the battle sheds new light on the slaughter of Custer and his troopers

“There Are No Indians Left Now But Me”

Dorothy Rosenberg | June 1964

So spoke Sitting Bull, greatest of Sioux chiefs, as he bitterly watched his people bargain away their Dakota homeland

The Man Who Killed Custer

Stanley Vestal | February 1957

To Stanley Vestal, the old Sioux warrior White Bull describes the day when he counted his greatest coup

Subscribe to Battle of Little Bighorn

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.