Authors

Matthew Palatnik is an Editorial Assistant at American Heritage and a third-time winner in the National History Day competition for the state of Maryland. He was also a top finalist in the national competition.

Jay Parini’s books include Robert Frost: A Life and the novel The Apprentice Lover .

Irene M. Patten is a New Englander who has taught English in secondary schools in Maine and Massachusetts.

Phil Patton is a writer and a journalist who primarily writes about automobiles. He is a contributing editor at Departures and Esquire magazines, and writes on automobile design for The New York Times, serves as a consulting curator, and published Bug: The Strange Mutations Of The World's Most Famous Automobile, in 2004. 

Rodman W. Paul, who is prof essor of history at the California Institute of Technology, is the author of several books, including Mining Frontiers of the Far West: 1848-1880 and A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote . For further reading: Great Basin Kingdom , by Leonard Arrington (Harvard University Press, 1958), and Mormonism and American Culture , edited by Marvin S. Hill and James B. Allen (Harper & Row, 1972).

Author-botanist Donald Culross Peattie, born in Chicago, now lives in California. His books include A Natural History of Trees , American Heartwood and Immortal Village .

Kathy Peiss is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at Penn, where she teaches courses on modern American cultural history and the history of American sexuality, women, and gender.  Her research has examined the history of working women; working-class and interracial sexuality; leisure, style, and popular culture; the beauty industry in the U.S. and abroad; and libraries, information, and American cultural policy during World War II.  She is particularly interested in the ways that culture shapes the everyday lives and popular beliefs of Americans across time.

James Penick, Jr. was a professor of American history at Loyola University in Chicago, and published numerous articles and books including Progressive Politics and Conservation: Ballinger-Pinchot Affair and The New Madrid Earthquakes.

Otto Penzler owns the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City and founded the Mysterious Press.

Regine Pernoud was a prominent medieval historian and curator of both the Museum of the History of France and the French National Archives. She received the Grand Prize of the City of Paris. She was the author of numerous books, and given the Grand Prize of the City of Paris and a lifetime achievement award by the Académie Française and for her scholarship.

Geoffrey Perret is an American historian and author who has written numerous presidential biographies and books about the American military. Perret served in the United States Army before turning to writing, and has recently written Commander in Chief: How Truman, Johnson, and Bush Turned a Presidential Power into a Threat to America's Future, in 2007, and Lincoln's War: The Untold Story of America's Greatest President as Commander in Chief, in 2004. 

Clay Perry is the author of Underground Empire , the last in a series on American caves. He is now writing an historical novel on Knox’s feat, in collaboration with John L. E. Pell.

COPYRIGHT © 1941 BY ROBBINS MUSIC CORPORATION, EDGAR LESLIE, AND FRED FISHER MUSIC CO., INC. FULL COPYRIGHT INFORMATION AT END OF ARTICLE. Darby Perry has recently been appointed publisher of AMERICAN HERITAGE . For this article he interviewed or corresponded with several Panay survivors and with Japanese pilots who participated in the attack. He is now at work on a book about the incident. The editors wish to thank Arthur F. Anders, the Panay’s executive officer, for permission to photograph the blood-stained chart on which he wrote his orders (see page 41). Mr. Anders, now a retired commander living in California, has a son, Air Force Major William A. Anders, in the astronaut program. It is only one generation from gunboat times to the space age.

George Perry is a British critic, author, and broadcaster, and former film editor of the London Sunday Times. He has produced more than 30 books, many on the movies, including two on Alfred Hitchcock, and his latest is James Dean, the first authorized biography of the American actor.

Joseph E. Persico (1930 – 2014), was a military historian and biographer, who served in the U.S. Navy and worked as chief speechwriter for Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. His last book, Roosevelt's Centurions: FDR and the Commanders He Led to Victory in World War II (Random House) was published in 2013.

—Ralph Peters is a former military officer whose novels include The War in 2020 .

COPYRIGHT © 1971 BY PETER COPELAND AND HAROLD L. PETERSON

Pamela Petro, a free-lance writer, once spent a summer working as a chambermaid on Block Island.

Thomas W. Pew, Jr., a free-lance writer living in Tucson, Arizona, has contributed regularly to such publications as Smithsonian Magazine, The Nation, The Progressive , and Defenders of Wildlife .

Mr. Phifer’s interest in Sam Davis began in grade school, when he read a poem about the Confederacy’s boy hero. “In 1947 it all came alive again,” he writes, “when I joined the staff of the Nashville Tennesseean as copy editor and book reviewer and found myself in Sam Davis territory.” He helped institute the pageant which now takes place annually on the grounds of the Davis home at Smyrna. Much of the information on which this article is based came from interviews with Mrs. Media Davis Sinnott, one of Sam’s nieces. Mr. Phifer, formerly copy editor of the Milwaukee Sentinel, has just completed a history of his adopted state, entitled Wisconsin: The Thirtieth Star.

Nathaniel Philbrick is a National Book Award winner and bestselling author of numerous books including Mayflower: A Story of Carnage, Community, and War (Viking 2006); Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution (Viking 2013); and The Last State: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (Viking 2010). His latest book, In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown (Viking 2018), was a George Washington Book Prize finalist.

—Among Cynthia Owen Philip’s books are Wilderstein and the Suckleys: A Hudson River Legacy and Imprisoned in America: 1776 Through Attica.

Mr. Auchincloss is both a novelist and a practicing lawyer as well as president of the Museum of the City of New Tork. His newest book, called Second Chance, Tales of Two Generations , will be issued in the autumn by the Houghton Mifflin Company of Boston.

John A. Phillips, who is with the History of Consciousness program at the University of California in Santa Cruz, teaches in the field of religious studies.

Cabell Phillips, the son-in-law of union leader Frank Keeney, retired in 1972 after twenty-seven years on the Washington staff of the New York Times . His most recent book, tentatively titled The Forties: Decade of Triumph and Trouble , is scheduled to be published this fall by Macmillan, Inc.

Maj. Robert Pierce, USAF (ret.), flew 160 combat missions in New Guinea. He has written and illustrated more than twenty children’s books and an as yet unpublished novel about World War II in Australia and New Guinea.

Mark Piesing is a freelance journalist and historian based in Oxford, England. He is the author of N-4 DOWN: The Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia, published by Custom House Books. His work has also appeared regularly in BBC Future, The Guardian, The Independent, Wired, and The Economist, among other places.

Robert E. Pike is now a writer and professor, but his respect for rivermen comes from first-hand knowledge. As a young man, he worked in various New England lumber camps. This article is based on a chapter of his Tall Trees, Tough Men , to be published this month by W. W. Norton.

Mr. Pitz is the author of nine books on the subject of illustration, and his own art appears in over 160 additional volumes. A resident of Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, near Chadds Ford, he is, in his own words, “an old friend of the Wyeths, father, children, and grandchildren.”

Nina Ascoly is an American writer and researcher. Bart Plantenga, half-Dutch, half-Frisian, is a novelist and radio disk jockey. Both live in Amsterdam.

Mr. Plowden is a New York free-lance photographer with a fine eye for vanishing Americana. This article is adapted from his new book, Farewell to Steam, just published by the Stephen Greene Press. The farewell is to locomotives as well as steamboats.

Sir John Harold Plumb (1911–2001) was a preeminent historian who wrote primarily on the 18th century and authored 35 books. At the start of World War II, he left Cambridge University to work at the top secret Bletchley Park facility, where he headed a section working on a German Naval hand cipher, Reservehandverfahren. After the War he became a Fellow of Christ's College at Cambridge, and was named Master of the College from 1978 to 1982. For American Heritage, Plumb wrote The Italian Renaissance (1961) and co-authored the American Heritage Book of the Revolution. Among his other books are England in the Eighteenth Century, The First Four Georges, The Penguin Book of the Renaissance, and Royal Heritage: The Treasures of the British Crown.

The author is a professional writer and photographer living in Ireland.

Jerald Podair is a professor of history and the Robert S. French Professor of American Studies at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, where he's taught since 1998. His research interests have focused on 20th century American urban history and racial and ethnic relations, a subject about which he's published numerous articles and reviews. He has also taught courses on a variety of topics in 19th and 20th century American history, including the Civil War and Reconstruction; Abraham Lincoln; the Great Depression and New Deal; the 1960s; the JFK assassination; and the Civil Rights Movement. 

Frederik Pohl’s science fiction has won virtually all the awards in the field, among them the prestigious Nebula (twice) and the Hugo (six times). He made two trips to the Soviet Union for his recently published novel, Chernobyl , which is not, alas, science fiction.

Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya (1958 – 2006) was a Russian journalist and human rights activist who reported on political events in Russia, in particular, the Second Chechen War (1999–2005). Her reporting from Chechnya earned Politkovskaya an international reputation. For seven years, she refused to give up reporting on the war despite numerous acts of intimidation and violence. Politkovskaya was arrested by Russian military forces in Chechnya and subjected to a mock execution. She was poisoned while flying from Moscow via Rostov-on-Don to help resolve the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis, and had to turn back, requiring careful medical treatment in Moscow to restore her health.

A screenwriter and novelist, Darryl Pumcsan is the author of Cinderella Liberty, The Last Detail , and Tom Mix Died for Your Sins .

Victoria Pope is the deputy editor of National Geographic magazine and its chief editor for text. Before joining National Geographic in November 2005, she was the executive editor for U.S. News and World Report. Her positions in editing and magazine management followed more than a decade as a foreign correspondent in Germany, Austria, Poland, and Russia. Victoria is the author of a forthcoming book on women pilots of World War II—shares keen insights on alternative careers for women.

Bruce D. Porter teaches political science at Brigham Young University. The themes in this article are expanded on in his book War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics , published this year by the Free Press.