Authors

Paul M. Sparrow is a writer, historical consultant, and the former Director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. Before moving to the FDR Library he was the Deputy Director and Senior Vice President at the Newseum in Washington, DC. He was an Emmy Award-winning documentary and television producer for twenty years. He began his broadcasting career at KPIX, the CBS affiliate in San Francisco. A graduate of UC Santa Cruz, Sparrow also has an MFA from the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College.

Mrs. Elizabeth G. Speare is a native New Englander who lives in Wethersfield, Connecticut. She has written a novel for young people, based on an episode in the French and Indian War, to be published this year by Houghton Mifflin.

Robert Speck attended the Coast Guard Academy and saw sea duty as a deck officer in the Maritime Service.

Ronald H. Spector, a professor of history at the University of Alabama, is currently on leave to serve as director of Naval History for the Department of the Navy. His book Eagle against the Sun (1984) won the Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt Prize in naval history.

Clark C. Spence is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Illinois. He published thirteen books, mostly on Western history, over a career spanning six decades. Known as the dean of mining historians, he was the first president of the Mining History Association and the eighth president of the Western History Association. In 2001 the Mining History Association established the Clark Spence Award, presented to books in mining history that best champion the research, interpretation, and writing skills practiced by Spence throughout his career.     

—Art Spiegelman is the author most recently of Open Me . . . I’m a Dog!

Roger Spiller’s essay on the World War II generation appeared in the December 1991 issue.

Roger J. Spiller retired as the George C. Marshall Distinguished Professor of Military History at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He is the first George C. Marshall Distinguished Professor of History at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. Spiller is a noted author and editor who recently wrote In the School of War, released in 2010. 

—Ellen Handler Spitz teaches in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University and is the author of Inside Picture Books .

June Sprigg is curator of collections at Hancock Shaker Village, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Indispensable to her research on this article, Ms. Sprigg reports, was Mary Richmond’s excellent Shaker bibliography.

John Springer has written several books about the history of the movies. He is the president of his own public relations company in New York City.

John G. Sproat (1921-2008) taught at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, where he was chair of the history department from 1974 to 1983 and a senior fellow at the Institute for Southern Studies. Sproat also taught at Michigan State University, Williams College, and Lake Forest College. He was a three-time Fulbright professor, twice in Germany and once in Indonesia, a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge, a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and a lecturer in India and Pakistan. He was the author of The Best Men: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age and served as series editor of the Southern Classics series published by the University of South Carolina Press. 

Vernon C. Squires was thirty-five when he wrote these letters. He had a master of science degree from Cornell University in architectural engineering and was working as a senior research engineer at the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. in Akron, Ohio, when he retired in 1975. He died shortly before this issue went to press.

COPYRIGHT©1972 BY HARPER & ROW

Michelle Stacey is the author of The Fasting Girl: A True Victorian Medical Mystery , about a woman who displayed mysterious symptoms after being thrown from a streetcar in 1865.

Walter Stahr is the author of Stanton: Lincoln’s War Secretary; Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man, a biography of one of the most important Americans of the nineteenth century; and John Jay: Founding Father, a biography of America’s first Supreme Court Chief Justice. He lives in Newport Beach, California.

Margot Liberty has lived with the Northern Cheyennes and. spent a year as a historian, interpreter, and guide for the National Park Service at the Custer Battlefield Monument. She now teaches anthropology at the University of Minnesota. She and Mr. Stands in Timber have worked together on a history of the Northern Cheyennes soon to be published by the Yale University Press.

Eric Stange is the founder and executive producer of Spy Pond Productions, which specializes in producing documentaries on historical and scientific topics. In addition, Strange is an award-winning director and writer whose work can be seen on PBS, The Discovery Channel, and the BBC. He has been awarded the Harvard University Charles Warren Fellowship in American History for his achievements, and writes a column on media and history for American Heritage.

An associate professor of history and American studies at Yale, David E. Stannard recently has published The Puritan Way of Death (Oxford University Press, 1977).

Steven D. Stark is a commentator on popular culture for National Public Radio and the Voice of America. This article is adapted from his new book, Glued to the Set: The 60 Television Shows and Events That Made Us Who We Are Today , being published in May by the Free Press.

Peter Stark is a historian and adventure writer. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Astoria, along with The Last Empty Spaces, Last Breath, and At the Mercy of the River. He is a correspondent for Outside magazine, has written for Smithsonian and The New Yorker, and is a National Magazine Award nominee. He lives in Montana with his wife and children.

A member of the Staff of the Columbia University Oral History project, Mr. Starr has worked on newspapers in Tennessee and Chicago and is author of Bohemian Brigade , a study of Civil War newspapers, published last fall.

Roger Starr, a housing and urban affairs specialist, wrote “This Is The Way the World Ends” in AMERICAN HERITAGE , October, 1970.

Admiral James Stavridis is an author and retired four-star U.S. naval officer. He led the NATO Alliance in global operations from 2009 to 2013 as Supreme Allied Commander with responsibility for Afghanistan, Libya, the Balkans, Syria, counter piracy, and cyber security. He also served as Commander of U.S. Southern Command, with responsibility for all military operations in Latin America from 2006 to 2009. He has earned more than 50 medals, including 28 from foreign nations in his 37-year military career.

— Michael Norman , a professor at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, and his wife, Elizabeth M. Norman , a professor at New York University Steinhardt School of Education, co-authored Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath ( Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2009).

Margery Wells Steer, who lives near Sherrodsville, Ohio, writes on American rural life. She has published numerous articles and a book, New Frontiers of Rural America .

Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was director of the creative writing program at Stanford University. He is the author of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, Angle of Repose, The Spectacular Bird, a National Book Award winner, and Beyond the Hundreth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. Stegner passed away at age 84 in 1993, and Stanford has honored him with a two-year creative writing fellowship called the Stegner Fellowship. 

Page Stegner wrote Winning the West: The Epic Saga of the American Frontier, 1800-1899 .

Harry Stein, who graduated last year from the Columbia School of Journalism, is now a free-lance writer living in Pans.

Robert Stein is an editor, author, and film critic who formerly served as Chairman of the American Society of Magazine Editors. In 2005 he released Media Power: Who is Shaping Your Picture of the World?, which details his prediction of the 24/7 media cycle in the United States. 

Alfred Steinberg is a free-lance writer of history and reporter of the Washington scene. He collaborated with Senator Tom Connally on his autobiography and is currently writing a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt.

Frank Stella is himself a renowned American artist; his most recent show opens this month at Manhattan’s Sperone Westwater Gallery.

Albert B. Stephenson, a retired mechanical engineer, drives a 1922 Model T around Whittier, California.

Sheldon M. Stern served as the historian at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston from 1977 to 1999. Stern has taught American and African-American history, developed the American History Project for High School Students in 1992, and written several books on the Cuban Missile Crisis, including Averting the Final Failure: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings, and The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis. 

Philip Van Doren Stern, a student of Lincoln and the Civil War, has contributed several articles to AMERICAN HERITAGE . This article is adapted from An End to Valor, soon to be published by Houghton Mifflin Co.

Rudi Stern is a kinetic artist who is “concerned with neon’s potential as a medium of artistic expression.” This article was adapted from his book Let There Be Neon , which will be published soon by Harry N. Abrams.

John Paul Stevens (1920-2019) was an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, nominated  by President Gerald Ford in 1975. Although Stevens was widely considered to be on the liberal side of the court, Ford praised Stevens in 2005, saying, "He is serving his nation well, with dignity, intellect and without partisan political concerns." Stevens was born on April 20, 1920, in Chicago, Illinois. He obtained his B.A. in English from the University of Chicago in 1941 and began work on his master's degree, but soon decided to join the United States Navy and served as a Lieutenant Commander from 1942-1945 during World War II.

Frank J. Stevens North Hollywood, Calif.

Col. Francis R. Stevens, Jr., is a retired Army officer currently under contract with the Appropriations Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Janet Stevenson (1913-2009) was a novelist, a journalist, and a social activist throughout her life. Stevenson wrote primarily on civil rights, the women's and the peace movements, and the environment. In 1986, she was elected mayor of Hammond, Oregon. Stevenson was writing and still politically active well into her 90s.

Nikolai Stevenson, a retired New York sugar broker, is president of the Association for Macular Diseases.

The author, now enjoying the mixed blessings of social security, is a long-time movie addict who has had to resort to free-lance writing to support his habit. He is a contributing editor of The New Englander .