Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
1960s
The year 1970 was a watershed, so we asked several thoughtful writers to reflect on key events.
Some of us remember dreaming, fifty years ago, of a computer small enough to fit in our home. And a telephone without wires.
The annual Burning Man Festival in Black Rock City, Nevada, is a week-long binge of festive dress, radical inclusion and pyrotechnic display that has become a spiritual phenomenon.
Bruce Watson is a Contributing Editor of American Heritage and has authored several critically-acclaimed books, He writes a history blog at The Attic.
Forty years ago a few rich kids hatched a nutty idea that became an event that rocked the nation, then morphed into a movement whose legacy lives on.
A magazine reporter covered the first American deaths in Vietnam, unaware that the soon-to-explode war would mark America’s awakening to maturity
On the evening of July 8, 1959, six of the eight American advisers stationed at a camp serving as the headquarters of a South Vietnamese army division 20 miles northeast of Saigon had settled down after supper in their mess to watch a movie, The Tattered Dress, starring
January 11 Surgeon General Luther L. Terry releases his report on cigarette smoking.
January 16 Hello, Dolly! opens at the St. James Theater in New York City.
Viewing a transformation that still affects all of us—through the prism of a single year
It has been called the “burned-over decade,” a “dream and a nightmare,” the “definitive end of the Dark Ages, and the beginning of a more hopeful and democratic period” in American history.
Reflections on the Rat Pack
Everybody knows what they did. This is what they meant.
On January 19, 1961, at a gala in Washington’s National Armory on the eve of his Inauguration, President-elect John Kennedy made a remarkable gesture. He rose to tell the crowd, “We’re all indebted to a great fnettes—Frank Sinatra.”
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