If you’ll turn to the portfolio of Mexican War daguerreotypes that accompanies our story on the San Patricios in this issue, you will find in the picture credits a spate of curatorial jabber. Indeed, there’s something almost amusing in the idea of these battered workaday views of a long-ago campaign being filigreed with the sort of explication one might better expect to accompany Leonardo da Vinci’s cartoon for The Virgin of the Rocks. But it did not amuse me a couple of months back when I learned we had to print all that or the Amon Carter Museum wouldn’t let us publish the pictures. I grumbled about the pedantic rigor of the stipulation, until it occurred to me that perhaps American Heritage had been partially responsible for it.

Fifty years ago, photographs just weren’t as important as they are now, at least, not as history. Berenice Abbott and Walker Evans, Steichen and Stieglitz, and scores of others had done much to push the photograph across the boundaries that delimit art, but historians still tended to view them as gingerbread on the solid structure of the prose that defined their calling.

There were illustrated histories, of course. In 1911 Francis Trevelyan Miller brought out his ten-volume Photographic History of the Civil War (although it may be indicative of the regard in which photos were held that after the book was off press, the publishers evidently simply tossed away the hundreds of pictures they had gathered). A quarter-century after that, Laurence Stallings published The First World War: A Photographic History; but that was more a grimly ironic essay than a history. Even the title was ironic, since there had been only one world war at the time; and the pictures—chosen and assembled largely for the mood they impart—make up what Stallings calls “the camera record of chaos, with the reader annoyed by only the briefest captions.” A sunken road full of German corpses, for instance, bears the sole legend “Tactical Blunder.” And there was the Columbia Historical Portrait of New York, the result of an imaginative project to commemorate Columbia University’s 200th anniversary. Rather than merely putting out a book about the college, Columbia decided instead on a picture history of the city in which it grew. John Kouwenhoven married pictures and text with a revelatory fluency that has not been surpassed to this day.

Kouwenhoven’s book came out in 1953; in December of the next year, the first issue of American Heritage reached its subscribers. It had been put together by people who took pictures seriously. The three founders—James Parton, Joseph Thorndike, and Oliver Jensen—came from a magazine that had made itself a towering success through the use of pictures, and now they intended to apply the techniques they had learned at Life to history six times a year, year in and year out.

Today, forty-one years later, it would be