Authors

This article was adapted from Screening History , published this month by Harvard University Press and based on a series of talks Gore Vidal gave as a participant in Harvard’s William E. Massey Sr. Lectures.

Thomas Viets worked at National Security Agency. He lives in Millersville, Maryland.

Geraldine Speez Vigoda (1928-2016) was born in Chicago and moved with her family to the Jackson Heights (New York City) area, where she lived most of her life. Mrs. Vigoda was a history buff and enjoyed cultural events including dance and theatre.

Captain Alan Villiers (1903 – 1982) was an author, photographer, lecturer and Master Mariner. Born in Melbourne, Australia, Villiers first went to sea at age 15 and served as one of the last captains of a commercial square-riggers, a grain ship out of Australia.  He captained the "Mayflower II" during her 1957 commemorative voyage and the "Joseph Conrad", which is now preserved at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut.  Villiers was the author of 25 books, including Men, Ships and the Sea, Falmouth for Orders and The Way of a Ship. He also wrote frequently for National Geographic.

Patricia Volk is the author of the memoir Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family .

Victor W. von Hagen, a resident of Connecticut, is well-known for his explorations in Central and South America; this article was written while he prepared his forthcoming book, The Highway of the Sun . Among his other books are Herman Melville’s Enchanted Islands and Maya Explorer: The Life of John Lloyd Stephens .

Richard Clement Wade (1921 – 2008) was an American urban studies professor and an advisor to many Democratic politicians and candidates, including Robert F. Kennedy. His unique approach to social science studies put an emphasis on cities. His book, The Urban Frontier (1959), challenged Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, asserting that the catalysts for western expansion were the western cities like Pittsburgh, Louisville and Cincinnati, not the pioneer farmers. Other books include: Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820-1860 (1964), Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis (1973) (with Harold Mayer) Photo: Larry C. Morris / New York Times

William W. Wade is at present deputy director of the Voice of America’s Munich Program Center. He is a former foreign correspondent and associate editor of Foreign Policy Association publications. For further reading: Great Britain and the American Civil War , by Ephraim Douglass Adams (Longmans, Green, 1925); The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe , by James D. Bulloch (Thomas Yoseloff, 1959).

Steven Wagner is Professor of History and former head of the Social Science Department at Missouri Southern State University. He teaches a variety of courses in twentieth-century United States history, and in 2012 was honored as Missouri Southern's "Outstanding Teacher" by the Missouri Southern Foundation. Wagner is the author of Eisenhower for Our Time and Eisenhower Republicanism: Pursuing the Middle Way. He also contributed to A Companion to Dwight D. Eisenhower. He received his PhD in history from Purdue University in 1999.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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), 

Calvin Warner is an attorney at Norton Rose Fulbright in Austin, Texas, and an adjunct professor of Philosophy at St. Edward's University. He received his law degree from Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tennessee, where he also served as an adjunct professor at Belmont University. Before law school Warner served as a research assistant at the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a frequently published writer.  

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).