Authors

PETER S. ONUF is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of Virginia, where he has taught for more than twenty years. Onuf is also Senior Fellow at Monticello’s Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. A leading scholar of Jefferson and the early American republic, he is the author, co-author, and editor of numerous books including (as author) Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (2001), The Mind of Thomas Jefferson (2007), and (as editor) Jeffersonian Legacies (1993). He is co-author with Annette Gordon-Reed of Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination 2016), a finalist for the 2017 George Washington Prize.

George Oppenheimer, drama critic, screenwriter, playwright, and author of several books, was a frequent guest at the Garden of Allah. For further reading: The Garden of Allah , by Sheila Graham (Crown, 1970)

Michael Oreskes is a journalist and author who has served in senior roles at The New York Times, the Associated Press, and NPR. He is the co-author (with Eric Lane) of The Genius of America: How the Constitution Saved Our Country and Why It Can Again, an examination of the history of the Constitution and the crisis it faces today.  Oreskes worked for 20 years at The New York Times, where he held various positions such as metropolitan editor, Washington bureau chief, and deputy managing editor. He later became the vice president and senior managing editor at the Associated Press, before joining NPR as senior vice president of news and editorial director in 2015. Oreskes is currently the executive editor of GlobalGoalsCast, a podcast about business development.  

Robert Garth Scott is the editor of Forgotten Valor: The Memoirs, Journals and Civil War Letters of Maj. Gen. Orlando Bolivar Willcox , to be published next fall by Kent State University Press.

Paul Ortiz is a professor of history at the University of Florida and director of the award-winning Samuel Proctor Oral History Program. His book, An African American and Latinx History of the United States was the recipient of the 2018 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. Prof. Ortiz is also the author of Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Blood Election of 1920, and co-editor of Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South (New Press)

David Oshinsky, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Polio: An American Story, holds the Jack S. Blanton chair in history at the University of Texas at Austin and is a distinguished scholar in residence at New York University. Other awards include: 2010 Cartwright Prize from Columbia University Medical Center for his research into the history of polio; 2009 Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Dean’s Medal for significant contributions to the field of public health.

Peter Osnos is an American journalist and the founder of PublicAffairs Books, which specializes in subjects such as journalism, history, biography and social criticism. Osnos founded the company in 1997, after serving as vice president and associate publisher at Random House (1984-1996). Before that, Osnos was a reporter and foreign correspondent for The Washington Post and served as the newspaper's foreign and national editor (1966-1984). Osnos has also served on the board of directors of Human Rights Watch, as vice chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review (2007-2012), and in 2020 co-founded Platform Books with his wife, Susan.  In May 2021, Platform will publish his book, An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen, to be sold and distributed by Two Rivers/Ingram.

James L. Swanson is a Lincoln collector and writes about the Presidents, copyright law, the entertainment industry, and the First Amendment. Lloyd Ostendorf, a Lincoln artist and collector, is the author of Lincoln in Photographs: An Album of Every Known Pose .

Fulton Oursler, Jr., a freelance writer, was formerly deputy editor in chief of Reader’s Digest . This article is adapted from Magic Man , a memoir he is writing about his father.

Richard Overy is a honorary professor at the University of Exeter and a leading English historian of World War II. His books include 1939: Countdown to War; The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia; The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars; Russia's War: Blood Upon the Snow; and his latest, Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War, 1931-45. Overy is also a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the British Academy and has contributed to the design of various Imperial War Museum exhibits.

William A. Owens is associate professor of English at Columbia University and director of the Oral History of Texas Oil Pioneers at the University of Texas. He is the author of Slave Mutiny: The Revolt on the Schooner Amistad (The John Day Company, 1953), the standard treatment of the famous Amistad case, to which all subsequent writers on that subject must be indebted. Professor Owens has also written a novel, Fever in the Earth , based on the oil industry. It was recently published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

Geoffrey O’Brien is editor in chief of the Library of America. His recent books include The Phantom Empire (Norton, 1993) and The Times Square Story (Norton, 1998).

Robert L. O’Connell is an intelligence analyst with the U.S. Army Foreign Science and Technology Center, in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is the author of Of Arms and Men: A History of War, Weapons, and Aggression (Oxford University Press, 1989).

Richard O'Connor (1915-1975) was the author of 21 books including Thomas, Rock of Chickamauga (1948), Jack London: A Biography (1964), Young Bat Masterson (1967), Iron Wheels and Broken Men: The Railroad Barons and the Plunder of the West (1973), and Gould's Millions (1973).

Copyright © 1958 by Leonard Wibberley. By permission of Henry Holt and Company, Inc., New York. Leonard P. Wibberley was born in Dublin but has spent much of his adult life in America, fifteen years of it as a Los Angeles newspaperman. He has written a number of novels, among them the recent McGillicuddy McGotham , and several works of nonfiction.

Joe O'Donnell (1922-2007) served as a combat photographer in the United States Marines during World War II, eventually receiving orders to photograph Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Tokyo shortly after the final bombings in August 1945. He later worked for the U.S. Information Agency, photographing Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. In Japan in the 1980s O'Donnell published Japan 1945: A US Marine's Photos from Ground Zero; an American edition was released in 2005. O'Donnell passed away in 2007 at the age of 85. 

A former New York newspaperman and CBS Radio executive news editor, Mr. O’Flaherty now resides in Richmond, Va., and is working on a book about blockade running.

James S. Packer is a western history buff who grew up in Carlsbad, New Mexico. He has written for numerous magazines including American Heritage, Smithsonian, and Family Circle, and is the author of Saints, Sinners, and Christian History: The Contradictions of the Christian Past.

—Peter Padfield’s latest book about naval warfare is Maritime Supremacy and the Opening of the Western Mind .

—Camille Paglia is a professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her fourth book, a study of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds , was recently published.

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. 

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.

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.

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 .