Authors

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.

Sylvester K. Stevens (1904-1974) was Pennsylvania State Historian and, from 1956 to 1972, executive director of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. The author of many volumes on the Commonwealth’s history, his classic Pennsylvania: Birthplace of a Nation (1964) drew a famous court suit from the daughter of Henry Clay Frick, who charged that Stevens was too harsh on the industrialist; the court sustained Stevens’s judgment.

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 .

David O. Stewart is a lawyer, public speaker, and bestselling author who has written both historical nonfiction and fiction across a range of subjects. His histories have explored the writing of the Constitution, the gifts of James Madison, the outrageous western expedition and treason trial of the mysterious Aaron Burr, and the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson. His histories have won the Washington Writing Award for best book of the year, the History Prize of the Society of the Cincinnati, and the William H. Prescott Award of the National Society of Colonial Dames of America. He has also contributed reporting and writing to various other outlets, including the Staten Island Advance, the American Bar Association Journal, the Washington Post, and History News Network.

Linda McK. Stewart is a freelance writer.

A professor of English at the University of California, George R. Stewart is author of such best-selling novels as Storm and Fire and of the recent nonfiction success, U.S. 40 .

Doug Stewart, a writer living in Ipswich, Massachusetts, most recently published The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare: A Tale of Forgery and Folly (Da Capo Press 2010).

Jamie Stiehm is a Washington-based journalist and public speaker who writes a syndicated column on national politics and history for Creators Syndicate. Her commentaries and op-eds have appeared in leading newspapers across the nation, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and San Francisco Chronicle.  She also wrote several essays for The New York Times' “Disunion” series on the Civil War, one of which was chosen for their hardbound collection, Disunion, published by Oxford University Press (2016). 

John R. Stilgoe, a recent winner of the Parkman Prize, is an associate professor at Harvard University and the author of Metropolitan Corridor .

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Mr. Stone works largely from sources in Spanish archives, and the story of La Navidad has never before been comprehensively told in English. He is the author of two earlier AMERICAN HERITAGE articles: “ Columbus and Genocide ” (October, 1975) and “ The Man Behind Columbus ” (October, 1976).

Oliver Stone is an acclaimed film director, tackling subjects ranging from the Vietnam War and American politics to musical biopics and crime dramas. He has received numerous accolades including three Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and five Golden Globe Awards. Among the films Stone has directed are the Vietnam War dramas Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), receiving Academy Awards for Best Director for both films, the former of which also won Best Picture. He also directed Wall Street (1987) and JFK (1991).

Geoffrey R. Stone is the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. Mr. Stone joined the faculty in 1973, after serving as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. 

GARRY WHEELER STONE is retired as Regional Historian for the State Park Service and Historian for the Monmouth Battlefield State Park with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

Todd Stone is a watercolorist and oil painter whose work over the last 20 years has examined the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and the ongoing reconstruction of downtown Manhattan. A native New Yorker, Stone moved to lower Manhattan in 1974. For many years, Stone’s work was primarily abstract, but always included in his practice were studio scenes, landscapes, and cityscapes, often featuring the Twin Towers as seen from his window. Located just six blocks from the Twin Towers, Stone’s home and studio were literally in their shadow. His “Witness” series has been exhibited at the National 9/11 Memorial Museum. He has been artist in residence at the World Trade Center since 2009. More information is at: Visit toddstonestudio.com/  

Mr. Stone, our guest columnist in Bruce Cation’s space, is an assistant professor of English and American Studies at Yale. He will become chairman of the Department of English at Emory University in Atlanta this autumn. He is the author of The Innocent Eye: Childhood in Mark Twain’s Imagination , and is at work on a biography of De Forest.

Neil R. Stout is associate professor of history at the University of Vermont. He recently completed a book, The Royal Navy in America 1760-1775 , for the U.S. Naval Institute and is currently working on another thatfocusses on the year before the Revolution broke out—1774.

Rebecca Strand Johnson is an Ohio-based freelance writer, the author of Wyoming, Ohio (Arcadia Publishing, 2006).

Ernest C. Miller has been an oil man for thirty years, as well as an author of books on petroleum. He has written Tintypes in Oil , and North America’s First Oil Well . T. K. Stratton is an industrialist who has made the collection of historical photographs his avocation.

John Strausbaugh is a contributing editor at New York Press. The Drug-User , which he co-edited, is due from Blast Books in October.

David Strauss graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude in 1973. He then spent two years at Magdalen College, Oxford, on the Marshall Scholarship and received a BPhil in politics from Oxford in 1975. In 1978, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was developments editor of the Law Review. He is the co-author of Democracy and Equality: The Enduring Constitutional Vision of the Warren Court.  Strauss has argued nineteen cases before the United States Supreme Court. In 1990, he served as Special Counsel to the Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate. He is a member of the national Board of Directors of the American Constitution Society.

Fred Strebeigh teaches writing at Yale.

Richard Steven Street is a California historian, winner of the Phelan Award for Literature, who is currently completing a definitive history of California farm workers.

Shirley Streshinsky’s article on Midway Island appeared in the April 2001 issue.

“Charles B. Strozier is a professor of history at Sangamon State University in Springfield, Illinois. This article has been excerpted from his forthcoming book, Lincoln’s Quest for Union: Public and Private Meanings , which will be published soon by Basic Books.

Al J. Stump lives in California, where it all happened. He has written five books on sports in America.

Mr. Sturgis is a free-lance writer and railroad buff who lives in New York City. Among his sources for this article were The First Transcontinental Railroad , by John D. Galloway (Simmons-Boardman, 1950); The Big Four , by Oscar Lewis (Knopf, 1938); The Story of American Railroads , by Stewart H. Holbrook (Crown, 1947); and The Great Iron Trail , by Robert W. Howard (Putnam, 1962).

Boyd B. Stutler is a newspaperman who for 18 years was managing editor of the American Legion Magazine . He has followed the John Brown theme for 40 years and is now working on a biography. He lives in Charleston, W. Va.

William Clark Styron, Jr. (1925 – 2006) was an American novelist and essayist best known for his novels, including: Lie Down in Darkness (1951), The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)and Sophie's Choice (1979); which inspired the Academy award-winning film starring Meryl Streep.

Until her death in 1960, Ruth Suckow was a distinguished regional writer, and many of her plots and characters have their roots in her native Iowa. Her first novel was Country People, published in 1924, and over the next thirty-five years there followed The Odyssey of a Nice Girl, The Bonney Family, The Folks, and several collections of short stories. This article was recently discovered among her papers by her husband, Ferner Nuhn, and is published here for the first lime.

Richard M. Sudhalter is jazz critic for the New York Post , author of Bix: Man and Legend , and a respected cornetist.

Mark Sufrin is a freelance writer who was a producer and writer of the Academy Award nominated “On the Bowery.” He has also directed film documentaries and been a motion-picture critic and lecture. 

Mr. Sugg, who is a leading authority on the works of John Faulkner, lives in Memphis, Tennessee, the metropolis nearest to Faulkner’s Mississippi hill country. It was with his cooperation, and with the kind permission of Mrs. John Faulkner, that the selection from Faulkner’s paintings on this and the following pages was made. With the exception of those for The Bear (opposite) and The House of Doom (pages 74–75), the captions were written by John Faulkner himself.

Mr. Sullivan, the distinguished science editor of the New York Times , has won many awards for his own writing on science.

Langdon Sully is the grandson of Alfred Sully. The letters and paintings included here belong to him and his brothers, Thomas, Robert, and Lealie

Col. Harry G. Summers, Jr. was the author of numerous books on military strategy and history including On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (1982). He was also an instructor and Distinguished Fellow at the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.  Summers served as a squad leader in the Korean War and battalion and corps operations officer in the Vietnam War. He also served on the negotiation team for the United States at the end of the Vietnam War.

Jeremi Suri is the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and holds a professorship in the university's history department and the LBJ School of Public Affairs. A 1994 graduate of Stanford with an M. A. in history from Ohio University, he received his PhD in history from Yale in 1994.  Among his many books are Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (2003), Henry Kissinger and the American Century (2007), and, most recently,  The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office (2017).

Rachel Swaby is freelance writer and editor based in Brooklyn, NY. Her first book, Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science—And the World, appeared in 2015. Ms. Swaby's writing has appeared in Runner's World, Wired, The New Yorker, Afar Magazine, Tested.com, O, The Oprah Magazine, Outside, and others. She is also a Senior Editor at Longshot Magazine, former presenter at Pop-Up Magazine, and was the editor in chief of The Connective, issue 1.

After a career in radio and television and as a professor of broadcasting, Tom Swafford is now retired and lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

A native of Illinois, Martha Swain has been a free lance writer in New York for several years and is now on the staff of the Office of Information Services at New York University

Jon Swan is an American poet, playwright, librettist, journalist, and editor. He studied at Oberlin College, from which he graduated with a degree in English in 1950. In the 1950s, he taught at the Ecole d'Humanite in Switzerland, worked for the American Friends Service Committee, and received a Master's Degree in English from Boston University. During the 1970s, he worked as a translator, from Dutch and German, and was senior editor at Saturday Review and, later, senior editor of the Columbia Journalism Review.After retiring in 1994, he worked as an editor in Beijing and Kathmandu. As a free-lance journalist, he has written about environmental issues in the U.S. and Iceland. He was awarded a Rockefeller Grant for play-writing in 1968 and a Guggenheim Fellowship for film-writing in 1981.

W. A. Swanberg has written highly acclaimed biographies of two American journalists, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, and is now at work on a third, on the late Henry Luce of Time, Inc.

James Swanson is a senior legal scholar at the Heritage Foundation and Edgar Award-winning author of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer (William Morrow 2006). Prior to working at the Heritage Foundation, Swanson served as a senior fellow in constitutional studies and former editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. He also worked for the U.S. International Trade Commission, clerked for Douglas H. Ginsburg, chief justice of the District of Columbia circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals, and worked in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice. Swanson studied history as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago before graduating from the University of California-Los Angeles School of Law.