[2] Print publication was suspended early in 2013,[3] but the magazine relaunched in digital format with the Summer 2017 issue[4][5] after a Kickstarter campaign raised $31,203 from 587 backers.

In September 1949, AASLH launched the magazine with broader scope for the general public, but keeping certain features geared to educators and historical societies.

They formed the American Heritage Publishing Company and introduced the hardcover, 120-page advertising-free "magazine" with Volume 6, Number 1 in December 1954.

[9][5] Though, in essence, an entirely new magazine, the publishers kept the volume numbering because the previous incarnation had been indexed in the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature.

[10] He warned historians against "regarding the past so fondly we are unable to get it in proper focus, and we see virtues that were not there.”[11][12] In 1964, David McCullough began his writing career as an editor and writer for American Heritage, which he sometimes calls "my graduate school".

Each is usually about 80 pages and has more "relevant" features and shorter articles than in the early years, but the scope and direction and purpose had not changed.

Wilentz claimed that McCullough and film maker Ken Burns followed the American Heritage style: "popular history as passive nostalgic spectacle" marching "under the banner of 'narrative'".

Beginning in 1973, and presumably as part of the then-current national lead-up to the Bicentennial, American Heritage teamed up with producer David L. Wolper for a series of four hour-long television specials (broadcast every few months between late 1973 and early 1975) based on events and people in American history, in documentary-like filmed dramatizations with actors taking the roles of historic figures, and key events re-enacted.

It had the goal of annually honoring an American author whose work shows "that good history is literature as well as high scholarship.