Authors

Mark Walczynski is a retired adjunct faculty member at Illinois Valley Community College and the Park Historian for the Starved Rock Foundation, located at Starved Rock State Park in Utica, Illinois. He is the author of The History of Starved Rock, which chronicles the development of the famous site from its earliest sighting by European explorers in 1673 to its designation as the centerpiece of Illinois' second state park in 1911.   

Malvin Wald was a screenwriter most famous for the 1948 police drama The Naked City, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Story.  Mr. Wald wrote over 150 scripts for motion pictures and TV shows including Peter Gunn, Daktari, and Perry Mason. He also served with the Army Air Forces and taught screenwriting at the University of Southern California.  Wald died at Sherman Oaks Hospital in Los Angeles from age-related causes at age 90.

Steven Waldman is a journalist, digital content pioneer, entrepreneur, and President and Co-Founder at Report for America, a nonprofit dedicated to strengthening our communities and democracy through local journalism. He is the author of the national bestseller Founding Faith: How Our Founding Fathers Forged A Radical New Approach to Religious Liberty, as well as Sacred Liberty: America's Long, Bloody, and Ongoing Struggle for Religious Freedom. 

Terry Waldo is a jazz and ragtime pianist and the author of This Is Ragtime (Da Capo Press).

Mr. Waldron first encountered llie legend of Richard Harding Davis in tlie reminiscences of a night city editor on tlic Newark, New Jersey, Star Ledger , for which he was a specialfeatures writer, rewrite man, and statehouse correspondent before he accepted his current position as a si/iff writer for the Institute of Life Insurance in New York City. For further reading: Richard Harding Davis: His Day , by Fairfax Downey (Scribner’s, 1953); The Richard Harding Davis Years , by Gerald Longford (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1961).

John Walker, author and critic, was formerly the director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Charles J. Errico is a professor of history at Northern Virginia Community College; J. Samuel Walker is the historian for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Dr. Wall, professor of history and dean at Grinnell College, is the first scholar to gain access to the Carnegie papers held by the United States Steel Company. The resulting biography, Andrew Carnegie , which will be published this month by Oxford University Press, is the basis for this article. COPYRIGHT ©BY OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, INC., 1970

Carol McD. Wallace is a free-lance writer based in New York.

Edward S. Wallace, who contributed “ The Gray-Eyed Man of Destiny ” to the December, 1957, issue of AMERICAN HERITAGE , is the author of several books, among them (with Major General John K. Herr) The Story of the U.S. Cavalry. Mr. Wallace lives in Lyme, Connecticut.

Paul A. W. Wallace, editor of Pennsylvania History , is author of several books on Indian and Colonial history. Inset drawings are by Ray Fadden, present-day Mohawk. They represent traditional ways of depicting the myths of the Iroquois.

Gregory Wallance is a lawyer and writer in New York City. He is the author of Papa’s Game, about the theft of the French Connection heroin, which received a nonfiction nomination for an Edgar Allan Poe Award, America’s Soul in the Balance, The Woman Who Fought an Empire, and the historical novel Two Men Before the Storm. Wallance has written op eds for The New York Times, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal, has appeared as a commentator on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, C-SPAN, and The Today Show, and is currently a Contributor for The Hill.

John Walton teaches in the education department of Johns Hopkins University and is the author of John Filson of Kentucke , to be published this year by the University of Kentucky Press.

A former editor of AMERICAN HERITAGE, Geoffrey Ward is an author and screenwriter of various documentaries on American history. He wrote the television mini-series The Civil War with Ken Burns and has collaborated with Burns on every documentary he has made since, including Jazz and Baseball. This work won him five Emmy Awards. Another Burns/Ward collaboration, The War, premiered on PBS in September 2007. In addition he co-wrote The West, of which Ken Burns was an executive producer, with fellow historian Dayton Duncan. Ward is the author or co-author of eighteen books, including five companion books to the documentaries he has written. A First-Class Temperament, his biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians.

Nathan Ward is an author and journalist who served as an editor at American Heritage. In 2010 Ward published Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront. Ward frequently writes for The New York Times, and he lives in Brooklyn.

A pioneer in the field of women’s history and a leading feminist biographer, Susan Ware is the author and editor of numerous books on twentieth-century U.S. history. Educated at Wellesley College and Harvard University, she has taught at New York University and Harvard, where she served as editor of the biographical dictionary Notable American Women: Completing the Twentieth Century (2004). She is the author of Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote and American Women's Suffrage: Voices from the Long Struggle for the Vote 1776-1965 (Library of America), 

Elaine Warner is a writer living in Edmond, Oklahoma.

Jack D. Warren, Jr. is a historian and the editor-in-chief of The American Crisis, a journal of history and commentary. He is also the author of The Presidency of George Washington, America's First Veterans, and Freedom: The Enduring Importance of the American Revolution, a narrative history of the war for independence. Warren is a longtime member of the Civil War Trust and a founding member of the American Revolution Institute. He formerly served on the faculty of the University of Virginia, where he was an editor of The Papers of George Washington, and was the executive director of The Society of the Cincinnati, which promotes knowledge and appreciation of American independence.  A native of Washington, D.C., Warren lives with his wife in Alexandria, Virginia.

COPYRIGHT © 1972 ROBERT PENN WARREN

The author of dozens of works for stage and screen, Dale Wasserman (1914-2008) is perhaps best known for Man of La Mancha, his Tony-winning book about Miguel Cervantes and his famous character, Don Quixote. Our thanks to Errol Lincoln Uys for generously lending us photographs from his recent book, Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression.

One of the foremost chroniclers of the American West, T. H. Watkins was an editor at American Heritage for six years and a long-time contributor. He also served as Editor of Wilderness magazine for fifteen years, and as Wallace Stegner Distinguished Professor of Western American Studies at Montana State University. Watkins is perhaps best known for Righteous Pilgrim, a 1990 biography of Harold L. Ickes, the crusading secretary of the interior for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which was a National Book Award finalist.  He also wrote The Hungry Years, The Great Depression: America in the 1930s, and two dozen other books.

Bruce Watson is a Senior Editor of American Heritage and the author of the critically-acclaimed books Freedom Summer, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, The Murders, and The Judgment of Mankind, and Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream. He has also written biographies of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. Watson writes a popular history blog at Visit theattic.space/.

John S. Watterson is writing a book on early reform movements in football.

Jack Waugh is a free-lance writer who lives in Elkins, Virginia, not far from the Canaan Valley.

Mrs. Dorothy G. Wayman was a newspaperwoman who covered the Sacco-Vanzetti trial for the Boston Globe. She was also the author of Cardinal O'Connell of Boston (1958) and numerous articles for various journals. Later she workeed as a librarian at St. Bonaventure College in upper New York State.

“I was graduated from, college in June, 1932,” John D. Weaver writes, “and came home to Washington, D.C., to find the shabby environs of the Capitol swarming with jobless men in frayed shirts, faded jeans, and overseas caps half-covering their thinning hair.” He talked to men and women of the bonus army and visited their camps; later this experience became the basis of a novel, Another Such Victory (Viking). For further reading: B.E.F. , by Walter W. Waters, as told to William C. White (John Day, 1933); The Crisis of the Old Order , by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (Houghton Mifflin, 1957); The Lean Years , by Irving Bernstein (Houghton Mifflin, 1960).

James R. Webb was an American writer who won an Academy Award in 1963 for How the West Was Won. Webb was born in Denver, Colorado, and graduated from Stanford University in 1930. During the 1930s he worked both as a screenwriter and a fiction writer for a number of national magazines, including Collier's Weekly, Cosmopolitan and The Saturday Evening Post.

The late Jeanne Curtis Webber was for many years a researcher for Fortune magazine, specializing in financial subjects. For further reading and looking: Wall Street, A Pictorial History , by Leonard Louis Levinson Ziff-Davis, 1961).

Mr. Webster is Curator of History and Art at the Roberson Memorial Center in Binghamton, New York. This is his second appearance in AMERICAN HERITAGE . For further reading: … and Tyler Too—A Biography of John and Julia Gardiner Tyler , by Robert Seager II (McGraw-Hill, 1963); Yankee from Sweden , by Ruth White (Holt, 1959).

Hensleigh C. Wedgwood retired in 1958 from the world-famous pottery that was founded in 1959 by his great-great-great-great grandfather, who sent Thomas Griffiths to America. Mr. Wedgwood, now a resident of New York City, owns the original journal.

Christopher Weeks, an architectural and garden historian, serves on the Board of Trustees of the Baltimore Museum of Art.

A professor of English at the University of Michigan, Robert P. Weeks has a summer home on Beaver Island and has made research on the Strang settlement a vacation hobby. Among important printed sources, he recommends The Kingdom of Saint James , by Milo M. Quaife (1930), and Crown of Glory: The Life of James J. Strang , by O. W. Riegel (1935)—both published by the Tale University Press.

James Powell Weeks, Ph.D., was a writer, researcher, editor, and archivist who served as a fellow at the papers of the Abraham Lincoln Project, Springfield, IL, and then as editor of the "Civil War Times." Over the years, he wrote many articles for publications ranging from Sports Illustrated to scholarly journals. Weeks also taught history at Penn State and the University of Scranton. Weeks received a B.A. in history, M.A. in journalism, and Ph.D. in history from Pennsylvania State University. He also received an M.S. in library science from the University of Pittsburgh. His Ph.D. studies focused on the Civil War and his doctoral research was published by Princeton University Press as the book, "Gettysburg: Memory Market and an American Shrine."

Mr. Weems is a member of the English department at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He wrote A Weekend in September (Holt, 1957), a fuller treatment of the Galveston hurricane, and contributed “Peary or Cook: Who Discovered the North Pole? ” to our April, 1962, issue.

John Edward “Eddie” Weems was a historian, author, and journalist born in Grand Prairie, TX in 1924. He had a prolific career as a writer and published many books and articles about Texas and Southwest history. Perhaps Weems’ best known work is Peary: The Explorer and the Man and is “considered to be a definitive study of the personal life of the first man to reach the North Pole,” due to Weems’ unprecedented access to Commander Robert Peary’s personal records, diaries, and letters, as well as the cooperation of Peary’s family.

—Caspar W. Weinberger, who was Secretary of Defense from 1981 to 1987, is the chairman of Forbes Inc.

Stanley Weintraub, Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University, is the author of Long Day’s Journey Into War: December 7, 1941 ; The Last Great Victory: The End of World War II ; and the just-published MacArthur’s War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero .

Dr. Weir, who teaches history at the University of South Carolina, is currently working on a book about the American Revolution in that state.