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As this issue was going to press, we learned that Oliver Jensen had died.

Oliver—along with James Parton and Joseph J. Thorndike, Jr.—founded American Heritage, bringing out the first issue of the magazine just a little over half a century ago in December 1954. The infant company grew quickly: Soon, it had launched another magazine, Horizon, which approached the world’s history much the way its sister publication did America’s. Jim Parton was an effective force on the business side, and Joe Thorndike edited Horizon. But Oliver’s interest remained most firmly rooted in the American past, and he focused his formidable energies mainly on this magazine.

Born in 1914, Oliver went to Yale; neither the school nor its state—where he spent much of his life—ever had a more steadfast supporter. Not long after graduating, he found his way into publishing, “employing,” he recalled, “my faint editorial abilities at the old humor magazine Judge, which, in the summer of 1938, was teetering on the edge of well-deserved bankruptcy.”

A couple of years later,  Judge was gone and Oliver was working as a writer for Life. His career, like so many millions of others, was interrupted by World War II. He served in the Navy in the Pacific and, afterward, wrote the first of his many books, Carrier War.

After V-J Day, he returned to Life, and left it in 1950 with his new partners to found a publishing company of their own. Life, of course, had become a prodigious success by making its pictures as important as its text. The partners used this same recipe in American Heritage, and, by so doing, began the process that in time would elevate the visual to parity with the written in the eyes of historians. The picture here shows Oliver sorting through historical photographs—the sort of big, crisply printed images that went into his book American Album, which he created with his colleagues Murray Belsky and Joan Paterson Kerr. Oversized, and with its black-and-white photographs reproduced by techniques that were, until then, almost exclusively consecrated to costly color art books, American Album was a record of every aspect of American life from the moment the camera opened its eye on the young country up until World War I, when the Kodak had become a common fixture in the home. The book is gorgeous, but what gives it a unique life are Oliver’s captions: He explains the sometimes remote doings in the photographs with such fluent intimacy, with such respect for his subjects and fond amusement at the foibles of their eras, that the readers feel they, too, are in the presence of Lewis Cass, or boarding the side-wheeler to go from Martha’s Vineyard to Nantucket.

American Album came out in 1968. In a year, it