Sic Transit Gloria History

Gray and raining at Ragged Neck this morning, which may explain why all the news at hand sounds bad:

Not ready for prime time. The New York Times reports that three-quarters of high school students who take a full set of college-prep courses in English, math, science and social studies still enter college ill-prepared for their first-year courses.

Historically illiterate. Another Times story tells us that 53% of high-school seniors lack a rudimentary knowledge of their nation's history. And that's the good news. Five years ago the figure was 57%!

American Heritage folds. The Forbes family bought this once-great publication and probably kept it going longer than was prudent. As you'll read here, this year they tried to sell it. No takers.

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.

Silver lining. Undereducated high-schoolers and anyone curious about our nation's past can access fifty years of American Heritage articles on the magazine's web site.

Try searching for writings on Wall Street. You'll find a treasure trove of articles, by John Steele Gordon and others:

Learn why, over the years, trading stocks has been like football.

Read a John Steele Gordon column with this irresistible lead:

“As long as there have been bankers and brokers,
there have been people asking what would happen
if they had to earn an honest living.”

Did you know that New York City suffered its first terrorist attack more than eighty years before 9/11?