He looked big, thought big, and built big…

His name was Henry Hobson Richardson, an architect whose ornate and monumental public and private buildings dominated the architecture of the 1870’s and 1880’s—great stone edifices that changed the face of America. John Russell tells his story in an excerpt from a forthcoming American Heritage book.

At war in a “Maytag Messerschmitt”…

Hughes Rudd, the well-known radio and television correspondent, also was a much-decorated participant of World War II as pilot of an artillery spotter plane—called the L-4 by the Army and the “Maytag Messerschmitt” by those who had to fly it. In a memoir at once witty and moving, Rudd tells what it was like trying to stay alive in this flimsy, vulnerable, and utterly indispensable war machine over the battlefields of North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany.

The world turned upside down…

Two hundred years ago this September, the troops of George Washington’s Continental Army laid siege to those of Lord Cornwallis at a place called Yorktown. The Americans won unconditionally—with a great deal of help from the French—as author Jack Rudolph relates in his fast-moving narrative, and in doing so gave the American nation a reality not even the councilors of George III could ignore.

Plus…

American hostages in the Middle East, 1901; Mark Twain in Hawaii; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., on “History and the Imagination”; and much more, all of it richly illustrated.