Authors

Keith Kyle is Washington correspondent of The Economist , of London. He took his degree in history at Oxford, where he studied under A. J. P. Taylor. This article is taken from a talk he gave over the B.B.C. some months ago on “The Third Program,” a kind of intelligent man’s radio service which unfortunately has no U.S. counterpart.

Paul G. Labadie is a writer based in Detroit. For information about Alamo Village, call 210-563-2580.

Lawrence Lader, who has written widely on history, is currently at work on a study, as yet unfilled, of radical movements in the United States since 1946. This article is based on material from the book, which will be published by W. W. Norton & Co.

Gavin Lambert is a Hollywood screenwriter and author of Natalie Wood: A Life .

James Lamont, Jr., is a freelance writer now living in the Chicago suburb of Deerfield, Illinois.

Marc Lancaster is a senior editor for The Sporting News. He has been a reporter and editor for a variety of print and media outlets, including the Washington Times, AOL, Tampa Tribune, and Cincinnati Post. He has also freelanced widely for other publications. He posts stories about combat journalism on his blog, World War II on Deadline. "I’m interested in contemporary accounts of the war — words written and broadcast, without the benefit of knowing what would happen on December 7, 1941, June 6, 1944 and August 6, 1945."  This fascination predates Lancaster's professional career. As a boy in Detroit, he spent hours reading old newspapers that his grandmother had used to decorate the walls, from Pearl Harbor through Reagan’s election. 

Paul Lancaster’s article on the life and times of the American motel appeared in the June/July issue.

Philip Langdon, a senior editor of Progressive Architecture , is the author of A Better Place to Live: Reshaping the American Suburb .

Mr Laning, the well-known muralist, contributed to our pages “Memoirs of a WPA Painter” (October, 1970) and “Spoon River Revisited” (June, 1971). His recent book, The Act of Drawing , was published by McGraw-Hill.

Jack Larkin is Chief Historian at Old Sturbridge Village. This article is adapted from his new book The Reshaping of Everyday Life in the United States, 1790-1840, published by Harper & Row.

Charles J. LaRocca is a retired high school and college level history teacher who founded a student research and reenactment group based on the 124th New York. He has published articles and two books and lives in Montgomery, New York. His most recent work is The 124th New York State Volunteers in the Civil War: A History and Roster.

Harold A. Larrabee is Ichabod Spencer Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Union College, Schenectady. One of his articles in AMERICAN HERITAGE, “ A Near Thing at Yorktown ” (October, 1961), is to be published soon in expanded book form as Decision at the Chesapeake (Clarkson N. Potter). For further reading: Days of Delusion , by Clara Endicott Sears (Houghton Mifflin, 1924); Yankee Kingdom , by Ralph Nading Hill (Harper, 1960).

Edward J. Larson is the author of seven books and the recipient of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History for his book Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion. His other books include Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory; Evolution's Workshop; God and Science on the Galapagos Islands; and Trial and Error: The American Controversy Over Creation and Evolution. Larson has also written over one hundred articles, most of which address topics of law, science, or politics from an historical perspective, which have appeared in such varied journals as The Atlantic, Nature, Scientific American, The Nation, The Wilson Quarterly, and Virginia Law Review. He is a professor of history and law at Pepperdine University and lives in Georgia and California.

Robert Larson, who lives in Hollywood, has had a varied career as artist, scene designer, journalist, motion-picture animator, and studio executive. In recent years he has devoted himself to scholarly pursuits, and is now engaged in research on the early history of Los Angeles. Illustrations on pages 107-108 are reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., from The Eagle, the Jaguar & the Serpent by Miguel Covarrubias. Copyright 1954 by Miguel Covarrubias.

Cedric A. Larson was a Stanford graduate and veteran of the Navy. He is the co-author of Words That Won the War; an examination of the papers of the Creel "Committee on Public Information."

—From Miss Sullivan’s letter written that next day

Abraham H. Lass, who died in 2001 at the age of 93, was an educator and writer whose books, articles and 40 years as an unorthodox teacher and outspoken principal made him one of the New York City school system's best-known personalities. He served 16 years as the principal of Abraham Lincoln High School in Brighton Beach, and wrote articles for The New York Post, The New York Herald Tribune, The New York Times and elsewhere. Abraham Lass went on to a career as an author and educator and was for sixteen years principal of Brooklyn’s Abraham Lincoln High School.

Clarence J. Laughlin, a writer-photographer who lives in New Orleans, has had his Louisiana plantation material exhibited in over sixty museums and university art galleries throughout the U. S.; some of it has been shown abroad by the State Department. He is the author of Ghosts along the Mississippi , published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1951.

Steven F. Lawson is an associate professor of history at the University of South Florida. He is the author of Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944-1969 .

Formerly in the educational department of Houghton Mifflin, Mr. Le Roy is now Director of the Washington State Historical Society. He is preparing a book, entitled In Search of History , which will include a chapter on Alfred Downing.

“History has always been a principal interest of mine,” says Mr. Leach, “and I have more or less concentrated on colonial America.” A retired businessman, he is now a resident of Nutley, New Jersey.

Historian Linda Lear is the author of Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (Houghton Mifflin) and Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature (2007). She also edited Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (Beacon Press, 1998)  Ms. Lear is the author of numerous academic and popular articles on Carson, as well as the author of introductions to the 40th and 50th anniversary editions of Silent Spring. Ms. Lear holds a Ph.D. in History from George Washington University. She has served as a Senior Smithsonian Research Associate, a Beinecke Fellow, Research Professor of Environmental History at George Washington University and Senior Research Scholar in History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. 

Tom LeCompte is a writer at Air and Space magazine who authored The Last Sure Thing: The Life and Times of Bobby Riggs in 2003. LeCompte's articles have been published in The Economist, Popular Science, and other noted publications.

Jane Mersky Leder is currently writing a book about love, sex, and World War II; you can reach her to share your own wartime experience at j.leder@comcast.net .

These definitions were drawn from A Glossary of Colonial American Words by Richard M. Lederer, Jr.

A Connecticut Yankee by birth, W. Storrs Lee is a free-lance writer who now “commutes” between homes in Maine and in Hawaii. He wrote Yankees of Connecticut (1957), Great California Deserts (1963), and The Islands (1966). For further reading: A History of Connecticut , by G. L. Clark (Putnam’s, 1914).

Derek Leebaert is an author and technology executive who has written several books on American history and the military. His works include Fifty-Year Wound: How America’s Cold War Victory Shapes Our World (2002), To Dare and to Conquer: Special Operations and the Destiny of Nations from Achilles to Al Qaeda (2006), and Grand Improvisation, for which he won the biennial 2020 Truman Book Award. Leebaert's latest book is Unlikely Heroes: Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants, and the World They Made.

COPYRIGHT © 1959 BY MARGARET LEECH PULITZER

Sandra Leff is director of research at the Graham Gallery in New York City.

A steady contributor to American Heritage, David Lehman has written both poetry and nonfiction books. He edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry and helped found The Best American Poetry, an annual collection of American poems, in 1988. In 1990, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Lehman an Academy Award in literature, and his latest works include Yeshiva Boys, a book of poems, and A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, both released in 2009. Mr. Lehman currently serves as the Associate Professor of Writing at the New School of New York.

Godfrey D. Lehman (1916-2010) was a salesman and journalist whose passion was the jury system. In 1997, he authored the book We the Jury: The Impact of Jurors on Our Basic Freedoms : Great Jury Trials of History

—John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, has just published On Seas of Glory , a history of the U.S. Navy.

Besides writing about early American cooking, Ann Leighton also grows some of its ingredients in the seventeenthcentury garden of the John Whipple House, Ipswich, Massachusetts, just declared a National Historic Landmark. This article is based on a chapter of her forthcoming book, For Meate and Medicine , to be published by Houghton Mifflin Company late next year.

ChrisTina Leimer, author of the Web site The Tombstone Traveller’s Guide , writes and lectures on American funeral practices. For more information on Hollywood Forever Cemetery, call 323-469-1181.

Nicholas Lemann has been the Dean and Henry R. Luce Professor at the Columbia School of Journalism since 2003. Lemann began his journalism career as a 17-year-old writer for an alternative weekly newspaper there, the Vieux Carre Courier. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1976, where he concentrated in American history and literature and was president of the Harvard Crimson. After graduation, he worked at the Washington Monthly, as an associate editor and then managing editor; at Texas Monthly, as an associate editor and then executive editor; at The Washington Post, as a member of the national staff; at The Atlantic Monthly, as national correspondent; and at The New Yorker, as staff writer and then Washington correspondent.

Mark Edward Lender is Professor Emeritus of History at Kean University in Union, New Jersey, and the coauthor of A Respectable Army and Citizen Soldier. He coauthored with Garry Wheeler Stone Fatal Sunday: George Washington, the Monmouth Campaign, and the Politics of Battle, a finalist for the 2017 George Washington Prize.

Edward G. Lengel is a historian in residence at Colonial Williamsburg, and previously served as Chief Historian of The White House Historical Association. Before that, Lengel was Editor-in-Chief of The Papers of George Washington and Professor at the University of Virginia. Mr. Lengel is the author most recently of Never In Finer Company: The Men of the Great War’s Lost Battalion. He is also author of Thunder and Flames: Americans in the Crucible of Combat, 1917-1918 (2015), To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918 (2008), and This Glorious Struggle: George Washington's Revolutionary War letters (2007).

Novelist, essayist, and professor of English at McGill University in Montreal, Hugh MacLennan has five times won the Governor General’s Award, Canada’s counterpart to the Pulitzer prize. He is best known in the United States for his widely acclaimed novel, The Watch That Ends the Night . “By Canoe to Empire” will be included in his latest book, Seven Rivers of Canada , soon to be published by Scribner’s. For further reading: The Voyageur , by Grace Lee Nute (Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, 1955); The Fur Trade in Canada , by Harold A. Innis (Yale University, 1930). © 1961 BY HUGH MAC LENNAN

Born in Toronto, Michael Lennick is a documentary filmmaker who has written and directed film and television series on space travel and technology for over 25 years. He is currently president and CEO of Foolish Earthling Productions, which has produced programming for The Discovery Channel, PBS, and other channels. His documentary "Dr. Teller's Very Large Bomb" chronicles the Manhattan Project and aired in 2006. 

Thomas C. Leonard, an assistant professor of history at Columbia University, has recently completed work on a book entitled Above the Battle: War Making in America from Appomattox to Versailles . This article is adapted from an essay that originally appeared in American Quarterly .

John Leonard is the television critic for New York magazine. This essay was adapted from Smoke and Mirrors: Violence, Television and Other American Cultures , just published by the New Press.

Aldo Leopold was an American ecologist, forester, and environmentalist. He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin and is best known for his book A Sand County Almanac, which has sold over two million copies.

Edward E. Leslie is the author of Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls: True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors . His Quantrill biography is forthcoming from Random House.