American Heritage

American Heritage magazine, which at its peak as a print publication reached hundreds of thousands of subscribers in the 1960s, began in 1947 as a small quarterly publication of AASLH. Mary E. Cunningham, editor for the New York State Historical Association, founded and edited for AASLH this American Heritage: A Journal of Community History.

In 1949 the magazine became American Heritage: New Series and included color illustrations. In 1954, AASLH kept the name and sold the magazine business to former Time-Life executive James Parton, who along with Oliver Jensen, Joseph Thorndike, Jr., and Pulitzer Prize winning historian Bruce Catton as editor, grew the newly titled American Heritage: The Magazine of History to a national circulation of 300,000 by the end of the decade. AASLH continued to benefit from substantial annual royalties from the magazine until a 1984 court settlement severed the arrangement.

In 2007, the Forbes family sold its majority interest in American Heritage to Edwin S. Grosvenor and others, and the magazine became a fully digital quarterly.

Read more about the history of American Heritage here and here.

See also:

• Local History, National Heritage: Reflections on the History of AASLH, by Frederick I. Rath, Jr., Charles B. Hosmer, Jr., Edward Alexander, Holman J. Swinney, and Cary Carson (1991)
• “Creating a More Meaningful Past: A Short History of AASLH” by Rick Beard in History News 69, no. 4 (2014), pages 22–27