Into the Sunset
[posted by Callimachus]
A world without James Brown in it is bad enough. Now we face a world without "American Heritage".
Circulation is as high as ever -- 350,000. They lost me, however, when they switched their focus to events of modern times in a bid to please baby boomers. I may technically be on the tail end of that wave, but I'm sick of it. So what's killing it? In part, you're looking at it:
Even after they went to a softcover format, I still have them stashed away. One of the most unforgettable articles for me was a haunting 1992 piece by John Updike about the lost 19th century art of post-mortem photography.
A world without James Brown in it is bad enough. Now we face a world without "American Heritage".
American Heritage was founded in 1954 by James Parton, Oliver Jensen and Joseph J. Thorndike Jr., refugees from Life, who from the beginning broke most of the rules of magazine publishing. They determined not to accept ads, for example — on the ground that there was a “basic incompatibility between the tones of the voice of history and of advertising” — and instead charged a yearly subscription of $10, a figure so steep at the time that readers were allowed to pay it in installments. They also published in clothbound, hardback volumes with full-color paintings mounted on the front.
The format was an instant hit with readers, who instead of tossing back issues often shelved them in their bookcases, but it initially confounded the United States Post Office, which decreed that American Heritage could use neither the book rate nor the periodical one. That ruling was eventually overturned, but not until the magazine had almost bankrupted itself by paying for parcel post.
The first editor of American Heritage was Bruce Catton, a Civil War historian who wrote in the inaugural issue in December 1954 that “the faith that moves us is, quite simply, the belief that our heritage is best understood by a study of the things that the ordinary folk of America have done and thought and dreamed since first they began to live here.” In the beginning, at least, that meant a fair amount of WASPy nostalgia and a steady ration of stories about the Civil War. That inaugural issue, for example, includes a piece about a Union general who was falsely accused of treason in 1862, as well as articles about the country store, the Fall River steamship line and a lament by Cleveland Amory about the decline of New York men’s clubs.
Circulation is as high as ever -- 350,000. They lost me, however, when they switched their focus to events of modern times in a bid to please baby boomers. I may technically be on the tail end of that wave, but I'm sick of it. So what's killing it? In part, you're looking at it:
“We’re really a general interest magazine,” [editor, Richard F. Snow] said. “We don’t play to a history buff in any narrow sense — like the Civil War re-enactors, for example. They can go on the Web and get thousands and thousands of hits.”
Even after they went to a softcover format, I still have them stashed away. One of the most unforgettable articles for me was a haunting 1992 piece by John Updike about the lost 19th century art of post-mortem photography.
