Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Literature
One of America's most distinguished publishers writes of his personal and professional friendship with the famed historian, Samuel Eliot Morison.
The broad expanse of ocean that separated Plymouth from Mother England helped create a novel experiment in democracy that grew as the American colonies expanded.
IT WAS LIKE THIS FOR OUR GREAT-GRANDMOTHERS
In the booming 1920’s, when business was nearly America’s national religion and advertising its Holy Writ, the Mather Poster Company of Chicago designed a set of texts to inspire greater peaks of productivity from the workingman.
How a champagne picnic on Monument Mountain led to a profound revision of Moby Dick — and disenchantment
A little group of American men of affairs and letters met along with their ladies on the morning of August 5, 1850, to hike up Monument Mountain, one of the more prominent features of the landscape surrounding Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
HOW TWO FAMOUS FIGURES OF THE TWENTIES GREW UP, MET, AND FELL IN LOVE
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. …” It was an odd way for a rich and world-famous young writer to end his third novel— The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, an extraordinary member of an extraordinary family, always claimed that God wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin
She had been brought up to make herself useful. And always it suited her.
WHAT POLIOMYELITIS MEANT TO A POLITICAL CAREER
This article is an excerpt from a new book on Franklin Delano Roosevelt recently published by Doubleday & Company. It is being publicized as The F.D.R. Memoir “as written by Bernard Asbell. ” Mr.
The prevailing Colonial feeling toward female education was unanimously negative. Learning to read was the first feminist triumph.
Could I have died a martyr in the cause, and thus ensured its success, I could have blessed the faggot and hugged the stake.” The cause was state support for female education, the would-be Saint Joan was Emma Willard, and the rhetorical standards of the 1820’
A Legend in Her Time
by Bessie Rowland James. Rutgers University Press, 447 pp. $15.00
A Little Visit to the Lower Depths via
No one, it has been said, ever really learns to accept the fact that it was a coupling by his parents that produced him. The novelist Louis Auchincloss extends this and says we can never believe in the sexuality of our grandparents.
Common Sense was a bestseller and turned the tide of public feeling toward independence, but for its author fame was followed by ingratitude.
The whole history of America affords examples of men who fitted precisely the needs of a particular moment, only to be cast aside, forgotten or traduced when the tide of events they created or manipulated waned and time passed them by.
Poe’s witticism was not meant kindly, but it was actually a compliment. Without doubt Margaret Fuller stood first among women of the nineteenth century.
A shy Yankee named Hannah Adams never thought of herself as liberated, but she was our first professional female writer.
If they should care to, the leaders of Women’s Liberation may add Miss Hannah Adams, born in 1755, to their roster of distinguished women. She was probably the first native American woman to earn a living as a professional writer.
If it rained, the painters failed to record it
Food tastes better outdoors, and it always has. Nowadays this rule, which every child learns early in life, can be seen in operation at tailgate parties at football games or wherever spectator sports are in season.
The longtime adviser to American Heritage wrote history not simply as a means of talking with other historians, but in order to talk to the general reader.
They say a tree is best measured when it is down. Allan Nevins is gone, at last, although he seemed imperishable, and we at AMERICAN HERITAGE feel a poignant sense of loss.
John Faulkner, like his more famous brother William, was a novelist, but he was also a painter.
Oriana Weems, Alma Lamour, Caroline Fitzhugh, Seth Rawbon, Netley Shiplake, Mordaunt—none of these improbable names is likely to mean anything to the modern reader, but to the generation that lived through the Civil War, and sighed and wept over the novels th
To begin with, the Presidential libraries do not look like what they are. Each one is, in fact, a miniature Office of Public Records.
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