Authors

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.

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.

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.

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 He has written and illustrated more than twenty children’s books and an as yet unpublished novel about World War II in Australia and New Guinea.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.

Matthew Pinsker is a professor of history at Dickinson College where he teaches courses in U.S. political, legal and diplomatic history. His research focuses on the career of Abraham Lincoln, partisanship in the Civil War era, American constitutionalism, the Underground Railroad and the history of U.S. campaigns and elections. He is the author of Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln, and writes a popular blog on Lincoln at https://substack.com/@matthewpinsker Pinsker earned a B.A. at Harvard University and a D. Phil. at the University of Oxford.

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.

—Gerald Posner is the author of Case Closed: Lee Harvey and the Assassination of JFK and Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Robert C. Post is president of the Society for the History of Technology and the author of Street Railways and the Growth of Los Angeles (Golden West Books, 1989).

E. Alexander Powell has been a foreign service officer and long-time writer for such magazines as Harper’s, the Atlantic, and the old Scribner’s; he has written 33 books. In preparing this article he was aided by Brooke Hindle, associate professor of history at New York University,who has just published The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America .

Ryan Powers is the host of the Almost Immortal history podcast.

Arthur Prager was the planning and operations officer of the Mayor’s Emergency Control Board in New York City during the 1980s. He authored three book: The Mahogany Tree: A History of Punch (1978), Underhanded Backgammon(1977) and World War II Resistance Stories (1984).

Mary Cable, formerly an editor of AMERICAN HERITAGE , is a free-lance writer and author of many books; Annabelle Prager, whoKe aunt was related to Jefferson Monroe Levy, is a writer and illustrator of children’s books.

Ivan E. Prall, who managed an engineering laboratory for General Electric in his hometown, is now writing in his retirement.

John Lowell Pratt was the author of Currier and Ives Chronicles of America and The Official Encyclopedia of Sports.

Roger T. Pray has worked as a prison psychologist, a director of a halfway house for prisoners, and a probation agent. He is currently a researcher with the Utah Department of Corrections.

Jane Freddy is an architectural writer and historian in New York City. She is working on a book on Eberson.

William S. Pretzer is the Senior Curator for History at the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of African American History and Culture. He previously taught history at Central Michigan University and served as the curator for the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Michigan, where the Rosa Parks bus is displayed in the "With Liberty and Justice For All" exhibit.  

Henry F. Pringle, formerly a distinguished New York newspaperman and professor of journalism at Columbia University, is now a contributor to several national magazines. This article, adapted from his Pulitzer Prize-winning Theodore Roosevelt: A Biography , is used by permission of the author and Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.

Carmine Prioli’s article on the World War II Japanese balloon-bomb campaign appeared in the April/May 1982 issue.

Carmine A. Prioli is in the Department of English at North Carolina State University. His article “The Ursuline Outrage” appeared in our February/March 1982 issue.

Elizabeth Brown Pryor is a State Department diplomat and noted Civil War era author. In 2008, Pryor was awarded the Lincoln Prize for Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee through his Private Letters.

Stephen Puleo is an author, historian, teacher, public speaker, and communications professional.  He has published seven narrative history books, including American Treasures, The Caning, A City So Grand, The Boston Italians, Due to Enemy Action, and Dark Tide. Mr. Puleo's most recent book, Voyage of Mercy, tells the story of the the Irish Famine, the USS Jamestown and America’s first humanitarian mission.

John J. Pullen (1914-2003) was a noted military history author and journalist. Best known for his 1957 book, The Twentieth Maine: A Volunteer Regiment in the Civil War, his writing helped renew popular interest in the Civil War. A veteran himself, Pullen served as a field artilley captain during World War II. John J. Pullen passed away at his home in Brunswick, Maine in 2003.

Mike Purdy is a presidential historian, founder of PresidentialHistory.com, and the author of 101 Presidential Insults – What They Really Thought About Each Other – and What It Means to Us. He is also the author of Presidential Friendships: How They Changed History. Mr. Purdy has been interviewed by and quoted in a variety of national and international media outlets, including The New York Times, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Associated Press, C-SPAN, Reader’s Digest, Reuters, Bloomberg BNA, the Huffington Post, and BBC. He has had numerous articles published by TheHill.com and the History News Network.

In her job as a member of the staff of the National Archives, Dr. Purdy arranged an exhibit on the “art” of diplomacy in 1971, and this article grew out of that exhibit. She was assisted in her research by her colleagues Dr. Edith James Blendon and the late Thomas M. Power.

Merlo John Pusey (1902 – 1985) wrote the 1951 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. He also authored The Supreme Court Crisis and Eisenhower, the President. From 1928 to 1971, Mr. Pusey worked for the Washington Post as an associate editor.

FROM Brave Men BY ERNIE PYLE. COPYRIGHT 1943, 1944 BY SCRIPPS-HOWARD NEWSPAPER ALLIANCE. COPYRIGHT 1944 BY ERNIE PYLE COPYRIGHT © 1971, 1972 BY HOLT, RHINEHART AND WINSTON. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF HOLT, RINEHART AND WINSTON, PUBLISHERS.

Carin C. Quinn received her master’s degree in American studies from California State University at Los Angeles in 1976; she now attends Neiv York University.