Harvard

Edwin S. Grosvenor | Spring 2019

The famous photographs at Harvard, first published in American Heritage in 1977, are at the center of a difficult debate over who owns the images.

Harvard’s Capitalist Experiment

Peter Baida | December 1987

The university struggled to define what a school of business should teach. What is the knowledge required for success?

Villains are important, and an institution that supplies us with villains performs an essential service. Take the Harvard Business School.

Walter Camp And His Gridiron Game

John Stuart Martin | October 1961

Man and boy—as player, “coach of coaches,” and keeper of the rule book— he was the guiding genius in the crucial, formative years of college football

No Son Unsung

Rene Kuhn Bryant | June 1958

The dogged effort to record the life of every Harvard man has reached the class of 1744, and with 3,000 new subjects being added every year, the end is nowhere in sight

“At 4, I took a wherry to London, Passed by multitudes of shipping & in an hour landed at King James’s Stairs, in Wapping: where I lodged; but could not persuade the Civil people who Entertained me, that I was born & educated in New England; & they wondered as much

“… Especially Pretty Alice.”

Henry F. Pringle | February 1958

During their courtship exuberant young Theodore Roosevelt puzzled the delicate Alice Lee, but they had three idyllic years of marriage before tragedy separated them.

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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.