A President’s secret diary…

from the pages of a scrappy informal journal, kept by Harry Truman at the 1945 Potsdam Conference, and published in AMERICAN HERITAGE for the first time, we learn what the Man from Missouri really thought of the fateful decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, of Winston Churchill—“I am sure we can get along if he doesn’t give me too much soft soap”—and of Joseph Stalin—“I liked the little son of a bitch.” Professor Robert Ferrell provides the necessary background.

Fire in the sky…

in “God Pity a One-Dream Man” Richard Rhodes examines the complex and visionary career of Robert H. Goddard—the father of modern rocketry and a dreamer of no small dimensions. Goddard’s hope, Rhodes reminds us, was nothing less than to save the human race from extinction.

Tracks in the wilderness…

these pioneers bravely struggled over the mountains, deserts, rivers, plains, and boggy mires of the West. In a wagon train? No—in the latest model from the Winton Motor Carriage Company of Cleveland, Ohio. It was 1903, and the pioneers were Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson and Sewall K. Cracker; their aim was to make the very first crossing of the continent by automobile—to satisfy a fifty-dollar bet and make history. They did it, and in “Ocean to Ocean in an Automobile Car” Stephen W. Sears explains how.

Plus…

what may be the first color photographs ever taken; a trooper’s firsthand account of an adventure with the Indian-fighting army; a color portfolio of paintings depicting the American worker at work; a collection of songs celebrating the pleasures of petroleum; the American dentist who rescued the Empress Eugénie from the howling mobs of revolution; and much more…