On a shelf near our office-supply cabinet sit three little steel boxes that are, in effect, the magazine’s memory. The five-by-seven cards they contain catalogue the name of every author who has ever written for us, the titles of the articles, the dates when they ran, and what we paid for them. They’re filed alphabetically, so it’s not until you get to the third box that you come across a wad of half a dozen cards, paper-clipped together. This packet charts the career of our most prolific contributor: Weisberger, Bernard A.

Dim on the first card is the information that Bernie’s inaugural American Heritage article, “Evangelists to the Machine Age,” ran in the fifth issue of the new magazine, in August 1955. No record of what he was paid for that or for his second piece, but the third one, “Pentecost in the Backwoods,” netted him $350. (This and the first story were drawn from research he was doing for his fine 1958 book They Gathered at the River: The Story of the Great Revivalists and Their Impact Upon Religion in America.) In 1960 he writes about the Lowell Mills; 1963 brings a Christmas bonus of $100; in the 1970s, he produces stories on Pinckney B. S. Pinchback, George Eastman, Benjamin Rush, and Paul Revere; in 1987 his essay “American History Is Falling Down,” he warns that the increasing fragmentation of the subject in the academy means that teachers are dismantling a coherent narrative and putting nothing in its place; in 1989, he publishes his first “In the News” column (in which he answers the many columnists who complained that the recently concluded presidential race has set “new lows in distortion and trivialization” by quoting a New York Times headline from the sainted Harry Truman’s 1948 campaign: PRESIDENT LIKENS DEWEY TO HITLER AS FASCISTS’ TOOL); and the final entry on the sixth card records that on 2/3/99 we acquired “Last in the News, July/Aug ’99 AH.”

Bernie inaugurated our “In the News” column and wrote it for a decade. He was the ideal proprietor for this franchise because he could connect present concerns to past precedents with effortless ease. Of course, that ease was the result of a lifetime of hard work and a promiscuous curiosity that produced not only the scores of stories in American Heritage but books on a spectrum of subjects that runs from Civil War correspondents to the flamboyant Billy Durant of General Motors, from the La Follettes of Wisconsin to the long, tense confrontation of the Cold War.

As for the effort, Bernie never let it show. His clean, brisk, relaxed writing, informed with strong feeling, but free always of polemicizing, drew a steady stream of correspondence from our readers that is itself a tribute to his warmth and accessibility. Not everyone agreed with him (Bernie is pretty close to an honest-to-God New Deal liberal, a distinction I found useful