Authors

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.

Will D. Swearingen is studying for his doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin.

Patrick Sweeney is a leading gunsmith and the author of many books on guns and gunsmithing.

Kevin Sweeney is a Professor of American Studies and History at Amherst College. In 2003, Sweeney co-wrote Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield with Evan Haefeli. He specializes in colonial North American History, the American Revolution, and Native American history.

Dr. Sweet was a retired dentist who lived in Fairport, New York, where he wrote free-lance articles and listened to tram whistles whenever possible.

Julia Sweig is the author of the highly acclaimed New York Times bestseller, Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight, longlisted for the 2022 PEN America Literary Award in biography. Sweig is the creator, host, and executive producer of the podcast In Plain Sight, a co-production of Best Case Studios and ABC News Studios. She also is the executive producer of The Lady Bird Diaries, a feature-length documentary film directed by award-winning filmmaker Dawn Porter, which is based on her book and podcast. 

Joel L. Swerdlow is an author, editor, journalist, researcher, and educator who has written eight books, among them Code Z, Media Technology and the Vote: A Source Book, and To Heal a Nation: The Story of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which he co-authored with Vietnam veteran Jan Scruggs and which became a 1988 NBC movie. His most recent work is Nature's Medicine: Plants That Heal: A chronicle of mankind's search for healing plants through the ages (National Geographic Books, 2000).

Claire Sanders Swift is an Emmy award-winning broadcast journalist and national media consultant. Her career began in Washington, DC with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times Bureau Chief, Hedrick Smith. She then honed her media acumen producing for ABC News, NBC News, MSNBC, Harpo/Paramount Pictures in New York and Los Angeles eventually returning to Washington DC. Swift also has a National Headliner Award, and a Distinguished Alumnae Award from her Alma Mater, Hollins University. She is past president and executive strategist of the American News Women’s Club.

A. Hughlett Mason—no kin of Charles—has recently retired as senior physicist for the Army Chief of Staff. William F. Swindler, professor of legal history at the College of William and Mary, is a specialist in constitutional law and American political history.

Ron Switzer worked at the National Park Service for 44 years, starting as director of the artifact lab preserving the cargo of the Steamboat Bertand. He later served as Superintendent of several National Parks including Mesa Verde, Jean LaFitte (New Orleans), Big Thicket National Preserve, Mammoth Cave, and Buffalo National River.  Mr. Switzer is the author of numerous journal articles and several books including The Steamboat Bertrand and Missouri River Commerce (University of Oklahoma Press, 2013) and When Justice Came to the Plains - Judge William Gaslin Jr. and Frontrier Law in Nebraska 1876-1889 (2014).

Craig L. Symonds is a noted author, historian, speaker, and a professor emeritus at the United States Naval Academy, where he formally chaired the History Department. A former Naval officer himself, Symonds has written over a dozen books on American Naval history, President Abraham Lincoln, and the Civil War. For his most recent work, Lincoln and His Admirals: Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. Navy, and the Civil War, Symonds was awarded both the Benjamin Barondess Award of the Civil War Roundtable and the Lincoln Prize in 2009. 

Gay Talese is a writer and pioneer of "New Journalism," a movement in literary nonfiction that also included figures like Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion. Throughout the 60s, Talese reported for publications like the New York Times and Esquire magazine, where his groundbreaking profile "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" won him critical acclaim. He is the author of 14 books, including The Voyeur's Motel, Thy Neighbor's Wife, and most recently Bartleby and Me: Reflections of an Old Scrivener.

Bernard Taper is a staff writer for The New Yorker . He is the editor of a volume of Mark Twain’s early journalism, Mark Twain’s San Francisco, the preface of which appeared in AMERICAN HERITAGE .

Professor Joel Tarr, of Carnegie-Mellon University, is an expert on the problems of America’s emerging urban centers in the early 1900’s.

Jerome Tarshis is a free-lance writer living in San Francisco.

Jeffrey Tayler is a U.S.-born author and journalist who has lived in Russia since 1993. He is the Russia correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and a contributor to several other magazines as well as to NPR's All Things Considered. He has written several books documenting various regions of the world, including Facing the Congo, Siberian Dawn, Glory in a Camel's Eye, Angry Wind, and River of No Reprieve, about a challenging raft trip down Russia's Lena River. Tayler is also fluent in several languages, including Russian, Arabic, French, modern Greek, and his native English.

A lifelong editor and publisher, Coley Taylor is now retired and living in Mexico.

ALAN TAYLOR is an American historian specializing in early United States history. He is the author of several books about the colonial history of the United States, the American Revolution, and the early American Republic. Since 1995, he has won two Pulitzer Prizes, the Bancroft Prize, and the National Book Award for non-fiction for his work. He is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He taught previously at the University of California, Davis, and Boston University.

John M. Taylor is the author of the 1970 biography Garfield of Ohio: The Available Man .

Candacy A. Taylor is an award-winning author, photographer, and cultural documentarian working on a multidisciplinary project based on the Green Book. She is the author of Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America (Abrams Books), as well as the curator and content specialist for an exhibition that will be toured by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) starting in June 2020. The exhibition will travel throughout the United States for three years.

—Teller is the smaller, quieter half of Penn & Teller.

A writer on architecture, Allan Temko has been teaching at the University of California at Berkeley. He is presently at work on a history of San Francisco Bay and its culture.

—Edward Tenner is the author of Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences .

AMERICAN HERITAGE BOOK SELECTION COPYRIGHT © 1970 BY STUDS TERKEL

Louise Hall Tharp’s most recent book is Adventurous Alliance , a biography of Louis and Elizabeth Agassiz. She has also written biographies of Julia Ward Howe and Horace Mann. For further reading: Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence , edited by Elizabeth Cary Agassiz (Houghton Mifflin, 1885); Life, Letters, and Works of Louis Agassiz , by Jules Marcou (Macmillan, 1896); Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science , by Edward Lurie (University of Chicago Press, 1960.

John Demos is a professor of history at Yale University and the author most recently of The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story From Early America . Robert Thayer owns an antiques business in Sheffield, Massachusetts, specializing in the art and artifacts of the early Republic.

Mr. Thomas is a well-known writer whose latest book is Sam Ward: King of the Lobby . The present article is adapted from his history of Delmonico’s famous New York restaurant, to be published by Houghton Mifflin later this year. For further reading: William Jay Gaynor , by Mortimer Smith (Henry Regnery, 1951).

Hugh Thomas, Professor of History at the University of Reading, England, is the author of Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (Harper & Row, 1971) and The Spanish Civil War (Harper & Row, 1977).

Benjamin P. Thomas was the author of the acclaimed Abraham Lincoln: A Biography (New York, 1952). His 1934 book, Lincoln’s New Salem, remains a classic study of the frontier community that was the setting for Lincoln’s formative years.

Bob Thompson is a former Washington Post journalist and the author of two books on American history. His first, Born on a Mountaintop, is an on-the-road exploration of the real and legendary Davy Crockett. His latest book is Revolutionary Roads, which takes readers on a tour of crucial sites of the American Revolution, both where independence was won as well as where it might have been lost. Previously, Thompson was a longtime feature writer for the Washington Post and the editor of its Sunday magazine. He has two grown daughters and lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, Deborah Johnson.

David Thomson is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood .

Betty Flanders Thomson is associate professor of botany at Connecticut College in New London and is the author of The Changing Face of New England , which will soon be published by The Macmillan Company.

James Thomson, a member of the East Asian Research Center at Harvard University, lectures on history there but is likely to be more familiar to readers as one of the experts who appeared on the ABC-TV network to furnish commentary during President Nixon’s trip to China.

John Thorn is the author of several books, among them three on baseball; The Invisible Game will be published by Doubleday next year.

Joseph Jacobs Thorndike (1913 – 2005) was Managing Editor of Life for three years in the late 1940s, and a co-founder of American Heritage and Horizon magazines. In June 1934, he started work at Time magazine, writing People, Miscellany and Education articles. He was asked by Henry Luce to join a group planning a new picture magazine, and when Life debuted in 1936, Thorndike, though only 23, was an associate editor of the magazine. Circulation at American Heritage rose to over 300,000. American Heritage sold to McGraw-Hill in 1970, to Forbes in 1986, and to Edwin S. Grosvenor, in 2007. In his early seventies, Thorndike served for two years as head of The American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel, a group of writers and scholars who are polled on acceptable English usage.

Joseph J. Thorndike, Jr., one of the founders of this magazine and now a contributing editor, is at work on a book about the Atlantic coast.

Tamara Thornton teaches nineteenth-century American history at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Willis Thornton (1900-1965) was a journalist, historian, and editor. He joined Scripps-Howard in 1921, working for the CLEVELAND PRESS and then the Washington Daily News, where he became city editor. In 1930 he moved to the Scripps-Howard feature service, Newspaper Enterprise Assoc., working both in the New York office as bureau manager and in the Cleveland office as writer and editor. During WORLD WAR II he enlisted in the Army as a private, serving with a prisoner of war interrogation unit in Europe and returning as a captain. He earned a master's in history from Western Reserve and lectured there in journalism and American history. Among Thornton's books were The Third Term Issue (1939), Almanac for Americans (1941), Fable, Fact and History (1957), and The Liberation of Paris (1962).

John Tidwell, a writer and television producer, lives in Maryland.

Alan M. Tigay, who writes frequently about Brazil and trans-American immigration, is the editor of Hadassah Magazine.

Bernard Timberg is the author of Television Talk: A History of TV Talk Shows .

George B. Tindall, professor of history at the University of North Carolina, is the author of South Carolina Negroes, 1877–1900 . He is now working on The Emergence of the New South, 1913–1946 , last of the ten-volume A History of the South (Louisiana State University Press). For further reading: The Legendary Mizners , by Alva Johnston (Farrar, Straus, 1953); Florida’s Golden Sands , by A. J. and Kathryn Abbey Hanna (Bobbs-Merrill, 1950).

As a small boy, A. L. Todd met the hero of this article, who died in 1935 as a retired major general. Mr. Todd published Abandoned: The Story of The Greely Arctic Expedition 1881-1884 (McGraw-Hil, 1961), based on the General’s unpublished letters, diaries, and papers.

John Toland, a free-lance writer who lives in Red Bank, New Jersey, is the author of Ships in the Sky: The Story of the Great Dirigibles .