January 2023

Samuel Adams Starts a Revolution

Editor's Note: A Pulitzer Prize winner, Stacy Schiff is the author of, among other books, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, for which she won the George Washington Book Prize, Cleopatra: A Life, and The Witches: Salem: 1692. Her most recent book is The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, from which the following is an excerpt.

What Were the Japanese Thinking?

Minister of War Hideki Tojo genuflected to the Emperor Hirohito in 1941, but in reality he and other military leaders were not subordinate to civilian rule. Tojo was relatively hawkish towards the U.S., which he regarded as arrogant and likely to make unreasonable demands such as halting the expansion into China and Southeast Asia. — Minister of War Hideki Tojo (right) genuflects to Emperor Hirohito when handed an imperial rescript on October 21, 1941, the 2,600th anniversary of the mythical founding of Japan. Tojo was a diehard militarist who regarded the United States as arrogant and sure to make unreasonable demands that Japan end its ruthless aggression against China and Southeast Asia.

The most basic fact about the Asia-Pacific War is that Japan alone controlled when it ended.

Counting All The Dead

Chinese women and children killed by the Japanese were among the 11 million estimated civilians killed in China during the war. Xinhua — These children and women were among the at least ten million killed in China during the war. Japanese air strikes on civilian targets were a common way of terrifying and destroying people. Xinhua News Agency

Cities Reduced to Ashes

Editor’s Note: David Dean Barrett is a military historian, specializing in World War II. His first book, 140 Days to Hiroshima: The Story of Japan's Last Chance to Surrender, was published in April of 2020.

After the bloody battles at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, planners feared as many as two million American deaths if the US invaded the Japanese homeland.

By the summer of 1944, U.S. military power in the Pacific Theater had grown spectacularly. Beginning days after the D-Day invasion in France, American forces launched their largest attacks yet against the Japanese-held islands of Saipan on June 15, Guam on July 21, and Tinian on July 24. Situated 1,200 to 1,500 miles south of Japan in the crescent-shaped archipelago known as the Marianas, they were strategically important, defending the empire's vital shipping lanes from Asia and preventing increased aerial attacks on the homeland.

August 2023

John Hersey Uncovers the Horror

Editor's Note: Lesley M.M. Blume is a journalist and the best-selling author of Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World, from which the following essay is taken.

Hiroshima first edition — *Published in 1946,* Hiroshima was judged the finest piece of American journalism of the 20th century in 1999 by New York University's journalism department.

“With Malice Toward None”

lincoln inaugural — Standing outside the U.S. Capitol building at the close of the Civil War, Lincoln sought to unify Americans by appealing to their common faith and heritage during his Second Inaugural Address in 1865. Library of Congress

Editor’s Note: Jon Meacham is a renowned presidential historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose latest books include The Soul of America and And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle, from which this essay was adapted.

Saved by the Poison Squad

wiley — Born in a log farmhouse in Indiana in 1844, Harvey Washington Wiley fought to strengthen food-safety policies first as the chief chemist at the Department of Agriculture and later as the first commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. Library of Congress

Editor's Note: Bruce Watson is a Contributing Editor of American Heritage who publishes a popular and respected history blog called The Attic.

The menu at a dinner table in 1900 might have looked like this:

Juicy beef, flavored with borax and formaldehyde
Green peas, laced with copper sulfate
Pork and beans, with a soupçon of formaldehyde
Lemon ice cream infused with methyl alcohol

Bon appétit, America!

January 2023

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