They say a tree is best measured when it is down. Allan Nevins is gone, at last, although he seemed imperishable, and we at AMERICAN HERITAGE feel a poignant sense of loss. We measure him now by the length of the shadow he cast, and by the abiding influence he had upon us and upon the magazine we serve. We also think of the friendship which he extended to everyone who knew him, and that is immeasurable.

A good many different men had a part in the founding of this magazine, but it seems safe to say that it would not exist in its present form but for the influence of Allan Nevins. Nevins was one of the great American historians, and perhaps he was greatest of all in this: he wrote history, not simply as a means of talking with other historians, but in order to talk to the general reader. He was in the grand tradition of Francis Parkman and William H. Prescott, which is to say that he was a skilled literary craftsman; and he was firmly convinced that history, written down and put between covers, has to be much more than a collection of Ph.D. theses. It has to give its reader a sense of the drama, the subtle excitement, and the immediacy of the events in his nation’s past. If it cannot give this, it fails; if it does give it, it enriches the life and broadens the horizon of the person who reads it.

How well or how inadequately this magazine may have embodied this ideal is perhaps a separate question. The point is that this was the vision Allan Nevins had, and this was the ideal that he kept insisting we should assimilate. He saw history as something exciting and moving as well as instructive; the people of the past were people of the present day, with both the faults and the virtues that we present-day folk see all about us; what they did shapes our own lives, and to follow them is to learn more than we can otherwise know about the values by which human life is lived and by which, at times, it has to be surrendered.

We used to have a way, on the staff of this magazine, of referring to Allan Nevins affectionately as our Faculty Adviser. This was all very well, in a sense, and at times there was something vaguely remindful of a staff of undergraduates engaged in a publishing venture, with a helpful professor standing by to ward off untimely errors. (This of course harks back to the long-gone day when students would allow a faculty adviser to come on the premises at all.) But the parallel is imperfect. My own experience in such matters, dating back (as it seems now) to the Neo-Pleistocene age, is that the faculty adviser was there chiefly to tell us what we could not do. As one of the