The coming of America’s bicentennial in 1976 inspired thousands of citizens to get involved in the work of local history. Collecting, recording, displaying, and recounting the stories of institutions, neighborhoods, and families was a way for people to celebrate America’s history on the scale at which they tend to experience it — the local level.
Editor's Note: David Chrisinger directs the Public Policy Writing Workshop at the University of Chicago, and is the author of several books, including The Soldier's Truth: Ernie Pyle and the Story of World War II, from which he adapted portions of this essay.
Editor’s Note: A longtime pilot and aviation historian, Philip Handleman is co-author with Lt. Col. Harry T. Stewart, Jr. of Soaring to Glory: A Tuskegee Airman’s Firsthand Account of World War II, from which he adapted portions of this article.
Bruce Watson, a contributing editor of American Heritage, writes for our website and his own at TheAttic.space.
WOODSTOCK, NY — Thirty miles down the road, on a slope so green and sweeping that it looked like God’s own amphitheater, the crowds poured in over half a century ago. But the human hordes are long gone now. In their memory, summer crowds flock to this Hudson Valley hamlet with the name that still sings.
Editor’s Note: Jonathan Cohen is a poet, translator, and scholar with expertise in inter-American literature. Portions of this essay originally appeared in The American Voice.
When David McCullough graduated from Yale University in 1955, his aunt bought him A Stillness at Appomattox by Bruce Cation. The gift changed his life.
“I had read very little about the Civil War, and nothing swept me into the human drama of the war as the Catton book did,” recalled McCullough, who, after working as an editor with Catton at American Heritage, went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes for his books on Harry Truman and John Adams.
“History, in his hands, was anything but dry and tedious with all the flavor squeezed out of it,” McCullough told me. “I was caught up in the enthralling, real drama about authentic flesh-and-blood people, and the pull was altogether as powerful as in a great novel.”
Editor’s Note: One of the most respected historians of the Civil War and Indian conflicts, Peter Cozzens has written 17 books, including The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars of the American West, which won the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History. He adapted the following from his latest book, A Brutal Reckoning: Andrew Jackson, the Creek Indians, and the Epic War for the American South.
