Johnstown

David McCullough | September 2022

In the hills above Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the old South Fork dam had failed. Down the Little Conemaugh came the torrent, sweeping away everything in its path.

Editor's Note: In memory of David McCullough, we reprint here the first article he wrote after he joined the staff of American Heritage.

Our Ten Worst Natural Disasters

Christine Gibson | August/September 2006

There is something uniquely chilling about a natural disaster - the uncontrolled, unpreventable fury of normally benign elements: a blue sky now black exploding in water and electricity ...

How The Hurricane Got Its Name

Christine Gibson | August/September 2006

It’s more than just whimsy

Our hurricane-naming system evolved much the same way our baby-naming system did. Just as it’s easier to say “Jane Q.

There Isn’t Any Such Thing As the Past

Roger Mudd | February/March 1999

David McCullough explains why he thinks that history is the most challenging, exhilarating, and immediate of subjects.

Pennsylvania’s Hard Hills

April 1993

After the coal and steel industries collapsed, we approached our congressmen about how we could develop tourism around here.

The Scene of the Crime

Charles Guggenheim | November 1992

Long-lost views of sunny, easy days at a wealthy lake resort foreshadow a terrible tragedy.

Two weeks after completing a film, in 1989 on the Johnstown Flood I received word from a woman in New London, New Hampshire that she had some photographs I might like to see.

Run For Your Lives!

David McCullough | June 1966

In the hills above Johnstown, the old South Fork dam had failed. Down the Little Conemaugh came the torrent, sweeping away everything in its path

The southwestern corner of Cambria County, Pennsylvania, is high, burly mountain country with fast trout streams and miles of dark forest.

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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.