Some historians have criticized the magazine for what they say is a lack of seriousness. Reviewing David McCullough's book on John Adams in "The New Republic", Sean Wilentz stated that during the 1950s, "'s style of seriousness eclipsed by the more journalistic and sentimentally descriptive style of "American Heritage", whose influence is everywhere." 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'". The magazine's editor at the time, Richard Snow, replied that "this magazine has never taken an overly sentimentalized or simplistic view of the past" and that "American Heritage" is "a magazine addressed to a lay audience and thus it has the usual fixtures—columns, picture stories, and so forth—and a variety of topics, some of greater consequence than others... but that it publishes many historians "whose work nobody has ever called simplistic, or sentimental, or undemanding.