Authors

Robert Wilson has been an award-winning editor at Preservation, Civilization, and The American Scholar, which he has edited since 2004. He writes often for magazines and newspapers and was on staff at USA Today and The Washington Post. Wilson is the author of biographies of Mathew Brady, Clarence King, and P.T. Barnum. He lives in Manassas, Virginia.

William Wilson, a retired Green Beret colonel, is a veteran of the parachute invasions of France and Holland in World War II and took part in the defense of Bastogne with the 101st Airborne Division. Wilson served as an intelligence officer on the Joint Staff in Vietnam and, after retiring from the Army, helped build “Camp David Accord” air bases in the Negev Desert. Fredric Paul Smoler, who teaches history and political theory at Sarah Lawrence College, helped in the preparation of this article.

Arkansas-born but for many years a resident of Vermont, Charles Morrow Wilson has written articles for the Reader’s Digest and other magazines. Among his books are The Bodacious Ozarks and News Is Country Grown .

Mr. Wilson, a frequent contributor to AMERICAN HERITAGE , is the author of Indiana: A History , published last year. For further reading: The Lords Baltimore and the Maryland Palatinate , by C. C. Hall (J. Murphy, 1902); Maryland; The History of a Palatinate , by W. H. Brown (Houghton Mifflin, 1912).

Mr. Wingrove is a recently retired communications manager for the Michigan State Police, and former Director of Communications for the Michigan House of Representatives. Mr. Wingrove received a Master's degree in Journalism from Michigan State University.

DOUGLAS L. WINIARSKI is a professor of Religious Studies and American Studies at the University of Richmond, where he teaches a wide range of courses on the history of religion in early America. More information about his scholarship can be found at www.DouglasWiniarski.com.

Jay Winik, one of the nation's leading historians, is the author of The New York Times bestseller April 1865, and 1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History. In April 2003, "April 1865" premiered as a critically acclaimed and Emmy award-nominated two hour feature documentary special on the History Channel, with a special preview at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Profiled on the cover of Washington Post TV Guide, the award winning special has been watched by some 50 million people.  Winik is also a regular contributor for history to the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

Allan Winkler is a professor emeritus of history at Miami University in Ohio. He is the author of The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942-1945(1978); Home Front, U.S.A.: America During World War II (1986); Life Under a Cloud: American Anxiety About the Atom (1993); and Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Making of Modern America (2006). His most recent book is "To Everything There Is a Season": Pete Seeger and the Power of Song (2009).

Adam Winkler is a professor at the UCLA School of Law. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America and We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

William W. W inn is the former managing editor of Atlanta magazine. He is currently a freelance writer specializing in articles on the South, and regularly writes a column for South Today , a publication of the Southern Regional Council.

Viola Hopkins Winner is completing a new study of Henry Adams entitled The Social Education of Henry Adams . She is also one of the editors of the six-volume Letters of Henry Adams (Harvard University Press).

Alexander Winston is the author who writes on the history of privateers and pirates, including his noted works No Man Knows My Grave (Houghton Mifflin, 1969) and Privateers and Pirates, 1665-1715.

Carter Wiseman is a journalist and instructor at the Yale School of Architecture. He was architectural critic for New York magazine from 1980 to 1996 and recently retired as President of the McDowell Colony. Wiseman is the author of Twentieth-Century American Architecture and Louis I. Kahn: Beyond Time and Style: A Life in Architecture. He lives in Weston, Connecticut. Photo courtesy of the Yale Alumni Magazine.

Mr. Wittenberg, a former newspaperman who now runs a public relations firm in Washington, D.C., contributed “Echec!” (about a nineteenth-century chess hoax) to the February, 1960, AMERICAN HERITAGE . For further reading: Wilson: The Struggle for Neutrality , by Arthur S. Link (Princeton University, 1960); The Enemy Within , by Henry Landau (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1937).

—Pat Willard is the author of Pie Every Day: Recipes and Slices of Life . Her latest book is A Soothing Broth .

Bertram D. Wolfe is the author of Six Keys to the Soviet System; Khrushchev and Stalin’s Ghost; and Three Who Made a Revolution, the first volume of a history of the Russian Revolution. He is now at work on the second volume, The Conquest of Power. Nine years younger than John Reed, Mr. Wolfe knew him personally, as he did many of the other persons and movements that figure in his picture of the world of John Reed.

Tom Wolfe’s most recent book is From Bauhaus to Our House , a controversial survey of modern architecture.

Mr. Wolff is the well-known author of In Flanders Fields (1958) and Little Brown Brother (1961). The above excerpt is from his new book, Lockout , published this month by Harper & Row.

Michael Wolraich is a journalist and the author of three books, two of them about American history: The Bishop and the Butterfly, Unreasonable Men, and Blowing Smoke. His writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, New York Magazine, CNN.com, Reuters, and Talking Points Memo. Wolraich grew up in Iowa and graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts before moving to New York City, where he has lived since 2000.

Everett Wood went on to fly for Pan Am for thirty-one years.

Andrew Wood, professor of communication studies at San Jose State University, details a small part of Americana that’s becoming a thing of the past.

Gordon S. Wood is Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University. He taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan before joining the faculty at Brown in 1969. He is the author of The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969), which won the Bancroft Prize and the John H. Dunning Prize in 1970, and The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize in 1993.

Nancy Wood is a renowned New Mexico author/photographer who has published 32 award winning books in the genres of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, children’s and photography. She began her photographic career in 1962 when she met the legendary Roy Stryker, director of the FSA photography project in the 30’s. The FSA employed such photographic giants as Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Russell lee, John Vachon, and Walker Evans. Wood worked with Stryker for the nest ten years, producing the classic book, IN THIS PROUD LAND. He taught her what he called “the art of seeing”.

Randall B. Woods, who has written extensively about American diplomacy and race relations, is a professor of history at the University of Arkansas. Another version of this story appeared recently in American Quarterly .

Carolyn Woods Eisenberg is a historian and a professor of U.S. History and American Foreign Relations at Hofstra University. She is the author of Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia as well as Drawing the Line: the American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944-49, which won the Stuart Bernath Book Prize of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations and the Herbert Hoover Book Prize and was a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Book Prize. She has written op-eds and done media appearances for numerous outlets, including the New York Times, National Public Radio, Fox, and C-SPAN. She has been a consultant to several members of Congress and is legislative coordinator for Historians for Peace and Democracy.

Arkansas-born C. Vann Woodward (1908-1999), Sterling Professor of History at Yale, was the author of The Burden of Southern History and of Origins of the New South, which won the Bancroft prize. His book The Strange Career of Jim Crow, published by the Oxford University Press in 1955 is an excellent study of the history of segregation. Woodward is considered, along with Richard Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to be one of the most influential historians of the postwar era, 1940s-1970s, both by scholars and by the general public.

Keith C. Woolley was a retired schoolteacher and coach who lived in Salt Lake City, Utah.  Mr. Wooley entered World War II on Dec. 21, 1942. He was a member of the 91st Reconnaissance Calvary, fighting in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, ending in the Po Valley as the war ended. He was part of first American troops to enter Milan, Italy after Italian partisans had killed Benito Mussolini. 

Sir Oliver Wright, a career envoy, was asked by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to come out of retirement to serve as the British ambassador in Washington in 1982. He stepped down last summer.

Donald Wright is SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor at the State University of New York College at Cortland. His books include Oral Traditions from the Gambia and African Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins Through the American Revolution.

This article has been written by a variety of different authors.

James Wunsch is associate director of the New Jersey Committee of the Regional Plan Association.

Bertram Wyatt-Brown is a professor of history at the University of Florida and a fellow at the National Humanities Center. One of his books, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South , was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Andrew Wyeth’s reminiscence of his father is excerpted from An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art , to be published soon by New York Graphic Society Books/Little, Brown. The book will appear in conjunction with a traveling exhibition of the art of the Wyeth family that opened in Russia and comes to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., on July 4. It then goes to Dallas and Chicago. The exhibition is made possible by a grant from AT&T.

A novelist, Oswald Wynd lives in Scotland.

Ben Yagoda is the movie critic of the Philadelphia Daily News . His last article for American Heritage , a history of Tin Pan Alley , appeared in the October 1983 issue.

Jonathan Yardley is a book critic and columnist for The Washington Post . He is the author of Ring: A Biography of Ring Lardner , and in 1981 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism.

Brock Yates is editor-at-large for Car and Driver ; his most recent book is the just-published Outlaw Machine: Harley-Davidson and the Search for the American Soul (Little, Brown).

Carol Lynn Yellin is a free-lance writer and an editorial consultant for the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis, Tennessee,

Ed Yoder won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in 1979. He has been a columnist for The Washington Post since 1982, and before that was an editorial writer for various newspapers including the Charlotte News, the Greensboro Daily News and the Washington Star.

Nancy Yos lives in Lansing, Illinois, and writes for Commentary magazine.

After Pearl Harbor, Seaman Young was assigned to the U.S.S. Honolulu and served in the Guadalcanal and New Georgia campaigns. Later, commissioned in the Naval Reserve, he returned to action in the Korean War. Today he lives in Boston, writes military features for the Boston Globe, and is associated with a book publishing company. His memoir was originally published in Proceedings, the monthly magazine of the United States Naval Institute, and appears here by permission.

Bob Yuhnke is a writer and environmental policy analyst who currently serves as co-chair of the transportation subcommittee at the US Climate Action Network. Previously, he helped lead the fight for clean air as an assistant attorney general responsible for cleaning up steel mill pollution in Pennsylvania, creating the acid rain program as a senior attorney at Environmental Defense Fund, and contributing to the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. Yuhnke earned a degree in American History and political science from Canisius College (’65), and completed all but the dissertation for a Ph.D. in history at the University of Virginia and Columbia University before attending Yale Law School (J.D. ’72).

—Richard Zacks is the author of several history books. His latest is The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd .

Dyan Zaslowsky, whose articles have appeared in Audubon, Rocky Mountain magazine, the Denver Post, and many other magazines and newspapers, is a free-lance writer living in Evergreen, Colorado.

Hans Zeiger is the President of the Jack Miller Center, a nationwide network of scholars and teachers who are committed to advancing the core texts and ideas of the American political tradition.  In preparation for the 250th anniversary of American independence in 2026, Hans is leading an ambitious campaign to expand the pipeline of scholars who are dedicated to the teaching of America’s founding principles and history, to seed and cultivate university campus centers for the study of the American political tradition, and to expand the teaching of core civic knowledge in America’s K-12 schools.