Authors

The author, a graduate of Stanford Law School, is a partner in the New York firm of Gaston Snow Beekman & Bogue.

COPYRIGHT © 1977 BY LUIGI BARZINI

Jacques Barzun, a scholar, teacher, and author, was past president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He was known for his studies of the history of ideas and cultural history, and wrote about a wide range of subjects, including baseball, mystery novels, and classical music. A professor of history at Columbia College for many years, Barsun  published more than forty books including Teacher in America (1945), which widely influenced the training of schoolteachers in the United States. His book, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (2000), was a historical retrospective considered his magnus opus.

—Jeanine D. Basinger, a professor of film history at Wesleyan, is the author of Silent Stars .

Mr. Bassett is a former president of the Sperry Gyroscope Company and a trustee of the New York Stale Historical Association. He makes his home in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

Hamilton Basso, though a steady New Yorker contributor and Connecticut resident, is a native o/ Louisiana. His Sun in Capricorn , about Huey Long, helped establish a reputation which ten other books sustain, the latest being The View from Pompey’s Head .

Judy Batalion is the author of White Walls: A Memoir About Motherhood, Daughterhood and the Mess in Between, as well as The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos, a New York Time bestseller. She has written for the New York Times, Vogue, the Washington Post and many other publications. Prior to her writing career, she was an academic and is fluent in both Yiddish and Hebrew. Born and raised in Montreal, Batalion now lives in New York with her husband and children.

Bob Batchelor is a cultural historian and biographer who has published books on Stan Lee, Bob Dylan, The Great Gatsby, Mad Men, and John Updike. His latest, Rookwood: The Rediscovery and Revival of an American Icon, An Illustrated History, won the 2021 Independent Publishers Book Award for Fine Art. The Bourbon King: The Life and Crimes of George Remus, Prohibition’s Evil Genius won the 2020 Independent Publishers Book Award for Historical Biography. Stan Lee: The Man Behind Marvel was a finalist for the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Nonfiction.

Bruce Batchelor became a flight-test engineer after serving in the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II. He is now retired in Mountain City, Texas.

Stephen Bates is a professor at the Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Bates is the author, coauthor, or editor of four books, as well as academic articles on privacy, obscenity, libel, reporter's privilege, political advertising, and journalism history. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, and the Wilson Quarterly, where he is a contributing editor. He has been a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Annenberg Washington Program in Communications Policy Studies, and the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University.

Dan Baum, previously a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker, is the author of Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans and Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, published by Little, Brown and Company.

Edward Latimer Beach, Jr. (1918 – 2002) was a highly-decorated United States Navy submarine officer and author. Beach's novel, Run Silent, Run Deep, appeared on The New York Times Book Review bestseller list for several months and was made into the 1958 movie by the same name starring Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster.

Carleton Beals is the author of over 25 books, and is well-known as a lecturer in this country. His latest book, Our Yankee Heritage: New England’s Contribution to American Civilization , was published this year.

Susan S. Bean is Chief Curator of the Peabody Museum of Salem, Massachusetts, where the ice-trade cup has found a permanent home.

Emily Morison Beck is the editor of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations . This article is adapted from the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Catharine Esther Beecher (1800-1878) was one of the most prominent and respected authors of her time, and a pioneer in the women's education movement. Born into the brilliant Beecher family, she was the sister of famed preacher Henry Ward Beecher and of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. In 1846 she published Miss Beecher's Domestic Receipt Book, a very popular book on cooking and a complement to her earlier book, A Treatise on Domestic Economy. Later she published the advice manual The American Woman's Home with her sister Harriet. With these books and her efforts as an educator, Beecher almost single-handedly established home economics as a discipline, emphasizing the importance of a scientific background as the basis for running the home.  

Robert L. Beisner, associate professor of history at American University, is the author of Twelve Against Empire (McGraw-Hill, 1968), the story of the anti-imperialists of 1898-1900. A portion of it appeared in the August, 1967, issue of AMERICAN HERITAGE . When this article was shown to Elbert Hubbard II, shortly before he died last November, the Fra ‘s son asked that we run the following comment, which we gladly do: “I have read AMERICAN HERITAGE ‘s article about my father and can only say, as he did, ‘Every knock is a boost.’ After all, it won’t be the first critical article about him and it certainly won’t be the last article about him—critical or complimentary!”

Thomas G. Beiden is an engineer and historian, currently associated with the U.S. Air Force as an operations analyst. He and his wife, a free-lance writer, live in Maryland and wrote this special article based on their book, So Fell The Angels, which will be published this fall by Little, Brown.

Patricia W. Belding, a free-lance writer and librarian, lives in Barre.

Richard Bell is a professor of history at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home, which was a finalist for the 2020 George Washington Book Prize.

Bob Boze Bell is executive editor of True West magazine . His books include Classic Gunfights and The Illustrated Life and Times of Doc Holliday .

Catherine Belton is the former long-serving Moscow Correspondent for the Financial Times. She has previously reported on Russia for Moscow Times and Business Week. In 2008, Ms. Belton was shortlisted for Business Journalist of the year at the British Press Awards. She lives in London.

Nathaniel Benchley (1915 – 1981), was an American author and longtime summer resident of Nantucket. Benchley wrote many children's/juvenile books and his 1961 novel The Off-Islanders was made into a motion picture titled The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Adapted Screenplay. He was a close friend of actor Humphrey Bogart and wrote his biography in 1975. Benchley's novel Welcome to Xanadu was made into the 1975 motion picture Sweet Hostage. He was the son of Gertrude Darling and Robert Benchley (1889-1945), the noted American writer and one of the founders of the Algonquin Round Table in New York City. His elder son, Peter Benchley (1940-2006), was a writer best known for writing the novel Jaws and the screenplay of the 1975 Steven Spielberg film made from it.

Robert Charles Benchley (1889 – 1945) was an American humorist best known for his work as a newspaper columnist and writer for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and central member of the Algonquin Round Table in New York City.

Robert Bendiner, who has interviewed Henry Kissinger and Justice Potter Stewart for this magazine, is a former member of the New York Times editorial board.

Mary A. Benjamin, a well-known autograph and manuscript dealer, is head of Walter R. Benjamin Autographs, of New York City.

Dr. William Bennett edits The Harvard Medical School Health Letter , and he writes frequently on medical subjects. Part of his training as a medical student took place at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Mr. Bennett is assistant professor of American Studies at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. For further reading: The Townsend Movement , by Abraham Holtzman (Twayne, 196)); The Politics of Upheaval , by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (Houghton Mifflin, 1960). Drawing of Dr. Townsend on page 99, ©1935 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.

Berry Benson was a young Confederate sharpshooter who served in General Samuel McGowan’s First South Carolina Brigade. His memoirs were recently published by the University of Georgia Press as Berry Benson’s Civil War Book.

Michael Knox Beran is the author of Jefferson’s Demons: Portrait of a Restless Mind and The Last Patrician: Bobby Kennedy and the End of American Aristocracy .

Professor Beresford, the author of a number of books on the history of the English landscape, holds the chair of Economic History at the University of Leeds, England.

—Thomas Berger is the author of Little Big Man, The Return of Little Big Man , and nineteen other novels.

Phil Berger, a former boxing writer for The New York Times and the author of a dozen fiction and nonfiction books, has been researching basketball history since the early 1980$.

V. R. Berghahn, a professor of European history at Brown University, is the author of several books on modern German history, including The Americanization of West German Industry, 1945-1973 (Cambridge University Press, 1987).

Laurence Bergreen is a prize-winning biographer and historian. His books have been translated into over 15 languages worldwide. His last book, Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe, was a New York Times “Notable Book” for 2003 and a bestseller. He has written for many national publications including Esquire, Newsweek, and the Chicago Tribune. Bergreen graduated from Harvard in 1972. He is a member of PEN American Center, and is a trustee of the New York Society Library. He lives in New York.

Avis Berman is a writer, curator, and historian of American art, architecture and culture. She is the author of numerous books including Rebels on Eighth Street: Juliana Force and the Whitney Museum of American Art; James McNeill Whistler; and Edward Hopper's New York. She was also co-author and editor of Katharine Kuh's memoir, My Love Affair with Modern Art: Behind the Scenes with a Legendary Curator. Since 2001, Avis Berman has overseen the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation's oral history project.

Paul Berman is a contributing editor at The New Republic,  and serves on the faculty of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU. A noted scholar on political ideologies, American history, and the modern Middle East, Berman has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and the Berlin Bosch Prize. Some of his well-known books include A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (Norton 1997), Terror and Liberalism (Norton 2003), and The Flight of the Intellectuals: The Controversy Over Islamism and the Press (Melville House 2011).

Dennis K. Berman is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal .

Anne Bernays is an American novelist, editor, and teacher. She has written extensively for national magazines and is a long-time teacher of writing at Boston University, Boston College, Holy Cross, Harvard Extension, Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, and MFA Program at Lesley University. Ms. Bernays is a founder of PEN/New England and a member of the Writer's Union. She serves as chairman of the board of Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and co-president of Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill.

Barton J. Bernstein is a professor of history at Stanford University and directs the university’s international relations program. His article “Why We Didn’t Use Poison Gas in World War II” appeared in the August/September 1985 issue of American Heritage .

Michael Beschloss has been called "the nation's leading Presidential historian" by Newsweek. He has written eight books on American Presidents and is NBC News Presidential Historian, as well as contributor to PBS's The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and two sons.

Alfred Hoyt Bill has lived in Princeton, New Jersey, since 1933 and has concentrated his writing on this area. His books include The Campaign of Princeton, 1776-1777 ; Valley Forge, the Making of an Army ; and A House Called Morven .

George A. Billias was a professor of history at Clark University and before that the University of Maine. A prolific scholar, Billias was best known for his magnum opus, American Constitutionalism Heard Round the World, 1776-1989; A Global Perspective. Billias also wrote several books George Washington's Generals And Opponents (1994) and General John Glover and His Marblehead Mariners (1960), as well as edited several collections including American Constitutionalism Abroad: Selected Essays in Comparative Constitutional History (1990). Billias also wrote Eldridge Gerry: Founding Father and Republican Statesman.  

Historian Ray Allen Billington (1903–1981)was the recipient of the 1974 Bancroft Prize and President of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) from 1962-1963. He authored numerous books including The Far Western Frontier and Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth Century. The Ray Allen Billington Prize is given biennially by the OAH to the author of the best book about American frontier history.

Alfred Bingham has been a lawyer, a magazine editor, an author of books on public affairs, a Connecticut state senator, a military government officer in occupied Germany, a workmen’s compensation commissioner, and a probate judge. In recent years he has been working on a biography of his father. This article is adapted from a talk he gave last year at the Explorers Club, in New York City.