Authors

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.

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures.  Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter. He received his B.A. from Carleton College in 1973 and an M.S. in journalism from Northwestern University in 1975. More information is available at his website.

Tom Birmingham is former president of the Massachusetts State Senate and a Distinguished Senior Fellow in Education at the Pioneer Institute. He was co-author of the landmark Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, which led to historic gains in Bay State student achievement. After enactment of the 1993 education reform law, Massachusetts SAT scores rose for 13 consecutive years. By 2005, the commonwealth became the first state whose students posted the top scores in the nation at every grade level and each subject tested on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as “the nation’s report card.” The commonwealth’s students also proved themselves to be internationally competitive in 2007 math and science testing, tying for best in the world in eighth-grade science.

The late Morris Bishop was professor emeritus of romance literature at Cornell and a frequent and esteemed contributor to this magazine.

The Editors and the author wish to express their deep appreciation to the museums and private owners without, whose wholehearted co-operation these outdoor photographs could not have been taken. Mary Black is Director of the Museum of American Folk Art in New York and author of numerous articles. Her books include American Folk Painting (with Jean Lipman) and Ammi Phillips, Portrait Painter , both published by Clarkson Potter. She is editing Limners of the Upper Hudson for Syracuse University Press.

George Black is a writer, journalist, and editorial consultant living in New York City. He is the author of seven books on subjects ranging from India and China to foreign policy and flyfishing, and many long-form magazine articles on international politics, culture, and the environment. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. Black is a former columnist for the Los Angeles Times and was foreign editor of The Nation from 1986 to 1991. His book Empire of Shadows: The Epic Story of Yellowstone was a finalist for the 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

David Black is an award-winning novelist, Journalist, and television writer and producer. His latest book, A Bobeh Myseh , will be published by Argonaut Press this fall.

Keisha N. Blain is a professor of Africana Studies and History at Brown University and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow. Her latest book is Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America, which chronicles the life and legacy of the civil rights leader.

Nelson M. Blake teaches at Syracuse University and is the author of A Short History of American Life . The foregoing article, in a more extended form, appeared in the September, 1955, issue of The Mississippi Valley Historical Review . Copyright, 1955, by the Mississippi Valley Historical Association

Rudi Blesh, our joremost ragtime scholar, has done much to keep Joplin’s memory alive. He is the co-author, with the late Harriet Jams, of They All Played Ragtime .

Bill Bleyer was a prize-winning reporter for Newsday for 33 years before retiring to write books and freelance for newspapers and magazines. He is coauthor, with Harrison Hunt, of Long Island and the Civil War and author of George Washington's Long Island Spy Ring, Sagamore Hill: Theodore Roosevelt's Summer White House, and several other books of Long Island history. Bleyer's writing has been published on Smithsonian.com and in Civil War News, America's Civil War, Naval History, Sea History, Lighthouse Digest and numerous other magazines and newspapers.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize. In 2011, he published a new book, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era, and he is at work on a new biography of Frederick Douglass.

As an editor of The New Republic in the Twenties, Bruce Bliven covered the workings of the Ohio Gang. He now lives in Stanford, California. His new book, The World Changers , consisting of biographical sketches of the eight most important men of the 1930’s and 40’s, will be published this October by the John Day Company. (The teapot cartoon on page 100 was drawn by Alley for the Memphis Commercial Appeal. For further reading: Teapot Dome , by M. R. Werner and John Starr (Viking, 1959); Teapot Dome: Oil and Politics in the 1920’s , by Burl Noggle (Louisiana State University, 1962).

—Keller is the contemplative hired killer who stars in Lawrence Block’s novels Hit Man and Hit List .

Murray Teigh Bloom is the author of the current book The Brotherhood of Money: The Secret World of Our Banknote Printers .

—Roy Blount, Jr., is the author, with the photographer Valerie Shaff, of If Only You Knew How Much I Smell You and I Am Puppy, Hear Me Yap .

Formerly a science writer for Newsweek , Michael Blow has written books on satellites and on ships, as well as the AMERICAN HERITAGE Junior Library book, Men of Science and Invention . He is currently with a New York public relations firm. For further reading: Sons of Science: the Story of the Smithsonian Institution and Its Leaders , by Paul H. Oehser (Abelard, 1949).

Lisa Blumberg is an attorney in Hartford, Connecticut.

Lesley M.M. Blume is a Los Angeles-based journalist, author, and biographer. Her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Paris Review, among many other publications. Her book, Everybody Behaves Badly, was a New York Times bestseller.

Martin Blumenson, formerly with the Army’s Office of the Chief of Military History, is now a free-lance writer in Washington, D.C. He is the author of The Duel for France; Anzio: The Gamble that Failed ; and Kasserine Pass .

Mrs. Dorothie Bobbe, a British-born resident of New York, is the author of Abigail Adams, De Witt Clinton, Mr. & Mrs. John Quincy Adams , etc. She is working now on a biography of Hamilton. Drawings from The Virgin Islands by Stuart Murray; Duell, Sloan & Pearce.

Dorothie Bobbé contributed the article on “The Boyhood of Alexander Hamilton” in the June, 1955, issue of AMERICAN HERITAGE . She is the author of a number of biographies, including lives of Fanny Kemble, DeWitt Clinton, and the Adamses.

Geoffrey Bocca, author of many books, including The Life and Death of Harry Oakes , served as a merchant seaman on the Murmansk Run and in other convoys during World War II and since then has logged more than forty voyages on fourteen ocean liners—including the Queen Mary.

A veteran of thirty-two years in the Foreign Service, including ten years in Japan, Carl H. Koehringer has recently been appointed executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce there. The prints on these pages all come jrom his outstanding collection of Japanese art.

Dr. Paul F. Boiler, Jr., who is now retired, formerly held the Lyndon Baines Johnson Chair of American History at Texas Christian University.

Roy Bongartz in a free-lance writer who, between books, writes about interesting places he has visited for the New York Times Travel and Resorts section.

Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Before joining the Council on Foreign Relations, Boot worked as a writer and editor for the Christian Science Monitor and The Wall Street Journal. He was awarded the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Journalism in 2007, and published his third book, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today, in 2006. 

FERGUS M. BORDEWICH is the author of eight non-fiction books, The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government (Simon & Schuster, 2016), America's Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A.

Hal Borland has been outdoor editorial essayist for the New York Times since 1942. He has published more than thirty books, most of which reflect his strong interest in conservation and natural history. Among them is the memoir Country Editor’s Boy .

The untimely death of David Boroff in 1965 cut short an active career as a tendier of English at New York University, and as a contributor to many magazines. His study of American colleges, Campus, USA , was published in 1961. For further reading: The Course of Modern Jewish History , by Howard M. Sachar (World, 1958).

Lewis Thompson and Charles Boswell, the collaborators on this article, are both free-lance writers. In 1954, they won an “Edgar” from the Mystery Writers of America for “general excellence in the field of true crime writing.”

Dr. Alexander O. Boulton is a Professor of History at Stevenson University in Stevenson, MD. Alex Boulton received his Ph.D. in History from the College of William and Mary in 1991. He is the author of a biography on Frank Lloyd Wright, and has written and photographed articles for American Heritage, American Quarterly and The William and Mary Quarterly. He is currently writing a book on ideas on race in the early Republic. He has also worked on archaeological sites at Colonial Williamsburg and Monticello.

David Bourdon has written extensively on art and antiques.

Vance Bourjaily (1922-2010) was an American writer, novelist, and professor, teaching at Louisiana State University, Oregon State University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Arizona. Bourjaily served in the Army during World War II and his first novel, The End of My Life, draws from his battlefield experiences.

Russell Bourne, a free-lance writer, was formerly an editor in the American Heritage book division.

Mrs. Rowen’s new book, The Craft and the Calling , from which tliis article is excerpted, will be published soon by Atlantic-Little, Brown.

David Bowers is chairman of Bowers & Merena Galleries, Inc., a leading dealer in rare coins, and has written more than a dozen books on numismatics.

Hal Bowser writes frequently on science and technology.

James Boylan is professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he taught journalism and history from 1979 to 1991. He was previously a member of the journalism faculty at Columbia (1957-1979), and was the founding editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. He is also the author of Pulitzer’s School: Columbia University’s School of Journalism, 1903-2003, has edited an anthology drawn from Pulitzer's New York World, and was a Pulitzer Prize juror.

Gerald W. Bracey is the author of Setting the Record Straight: Responses to Misconceptions About Public Education in the United States (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1997).

Tom Braden was for many years the editor and publisher of the Oceanside, California, Blade Tribune , and is now active in and around Washington, D.C. With the late Stewart Alsop he was the co-author of Sub Rosa: The OSS and American Espionage .

General covers the years of his closest association with Eisenhower, from 1943 through 1945. Following his service in World War II, General Bradley served as Army Chief of Staff and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

James Brady profiled celebrities for twenty-five years in his widely read “In Step With” column for PARADE Magazine. He also wrote the popular "Page Six" gossip column in the New York Post and W magazine, as well as a weekly column for Advertising Age. Brady wrote several books related to war, including The Coldest War: A Memoir of Korea and Why Marines Fight, and a couple of novels. He served as a United States Marine Corps officer in the Korean War.  

Writer of books, short stories and magazine articles, William Brandon has spent much time in the West. His most recent book, The Men and the Mountain , from which the above article has been adapted, was published last April.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.  In addition to his books, Brands has also written articles and reviews for magazine and newspapers, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Smithsonian.