Authors

James D. Hart, professor of English at the University of California, is the author of The Oxford Companion to American Literature and The Popular Book .

James McKinley is the author of Assassination in America .

Sam McKinney is coordinator of the Columbia River Heritage Program at the Oregon Historical Society. His recent book, Reach of Tide, Ring of History , was published by the Oregon Historical Society Press.

John McLaughlin is an Emeritus Professor of English at Clemson University, where he was head of the Humanities Division. He is the author of Jefferson and Monticello, about the life of Thomas Jefferson as seen through the prism of his fifty-year love affair with Monticello, which was nominated for a National Book Award in 1988. McLaughlin also wrote To His Excellency Thomas Jefferson, Letters to a President, and has contributed to such scholarly journals as Shakespeare Quarterly and Modern Drama.

Mike McLaughlin and his wife live in Winthrop, Massachusetts. They are deeply grateful to the members of the U.S.S. Maddox Association for all their assistance in writing this article, especially Ken and Lily Chestnut. Readers wishing to know more about the Maddox can get in touch with the U.S. Naval Institute’s History Department in Annapolis, Maryland, for contact information.

Stewart D. McLaurin is president of The White House Historical Association, a private nonprofit, nonpartisan organization founded by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in 1961 to share and preserve the rich history of the White House. Now in his twelfth year as president, Mr. McLaurin has expanded the Association’s programming through award-winning books, videos, teacher engagement, and virtual and in-person programming.  Mr. McLaurin is the author of the 2021 anthology James Hoban: Designer and Builder of the White House, and writes a monthly column for USA Today on the history of the White House and our nation’s presidents and first ladies.  He graduated from the University of Alabama with a BA in American History and Political Science. 

Dr. McMahon is director of historical programs at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute.

Jodi McMaster, a Texas lawyer, is the author of the forthcoming Beyond Slip and Fall: Premises Liability for Paralegals (Estrin Publishing).

George McMillan wrote The Old Breed: A History of the First Marine Division in World War II; he served with the division in the Pacific theatre as a Marine combat correspondent. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he has contributed articles on the Corps and on other subjects to many of the nation’s leading periodicals. The drawings on this and the preceding pages were done by Mitchell Jamieson, a Navy combat artist in World War II and now a faculty member at the University of Maryland.

Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. His other works include two collections of essays, three memoirs, and more than thirty screenplays, including the co-authorship of Brokeback Mountain, for which he received an Academy Award. His most recent novel, When the Light Goes, is available from Simon & Schuster. He lives in Archer City, Texas

Catherine McNeur is an associate professor of history at Portland State University and the author of Taming Manhattan and Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science. Prof. McNeur is the recipient of several awards, including the American Society for Environmental History’s George Perkins Marsh Prize. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Mac McPhail is a columnist for The Sampson Independent of Clinton, NC, and author of Wandering Thoughts from a Wondering Mind, a collection of his columns from over the years.

James M. McPherson, the George Henry Davis ’86 Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, is perhaps America’s foremost living Civil War scholar. Among his books are his one-volume history of the war, Battle Cry of Freedom, Lincoln and The Second American Revolution, and For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, winner of the Lincoln Prize in 1998. 

Mary Frech McVicker is a full-time writer of both fiction and nonfiction based in Brookfield, Illinois.

Ellen B. Meacham is an award-winning writer who teaches journalism at The University of Mississippi and is the author of Delta Epiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi. (University Press of Mississippi, 2018) Her work has appeared in The New York Times, USA Today Online, Charleston Post and Courier, Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi, and numerous other publications. She has been featured on “Hardball with Chris Matthews” on MSNBC, the BBC, Ireland’s Newstalk Radio, Newsmax television, “Marketplace with Kai Ryssdal” and on numerous other public radio shows around the nation.

Jon Meacham is a renowned presidential historian, contributing writer to The New York Times Book Review, contributing editor at TIME, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose latest books include, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels (Random House, 2018) and Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (Random House, 2015). 

Judson Mead is associate editor of Americana magazine.

Charles L. Mee, Jr.’s most recent book is The Genius of the People , the story of the Constitutional Convention. It was published by Harper & Row earlier this year. Mr. Mee lives in New York.

Ira Meistrich is a freelance television producer who lives in New York City

Greg Melville is an author and journalist who teaches English at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he was the recipient of the school's Award for Teaching Excellence in 2019. His writing has appeared in many top publications including Outside, Men's Health, National Geographic Traveler, and The New York Times. Melville's environmental book Greasy Rider was the 'campus common read' for six colleges and universities, and named by the American Library Association as one of the top 100 "Outstanding Books for the College Bound" for the first decade of the 2000s. He has served as an editor at Men's Journal, Sports Afield, and Footwear News and as a reporter for a daily newspaper in Northern Virginia.

Phillips Melville is a retired Air Force colonel now living in Washington, D.C., who has undertaken a new career as a marine artist and author.

Louis Menand is a professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. This essay is adapted from his introduction to Pragmatism: A Reader , which is being published by Vintage this month.

Ink Mendelsohn is a writer and editor for the Smithsonian News Service.

An attorney and free-lance writer, Bill Merrell is also the head coach of women’s intercollegiate soccer at the University of California at Berkeley.

Robert Merry is the former editor of The American Conservative and a longtime Washington journalist and publishing executive. He has published five books on American history and foreign policy, including President McKinley: Architect of the American Century. Merry spent 12 years as a political reporter for The Wall Street Journal and 22 years as an executive at Congressional Quarterly Inc., including 12 years as CEO. After CQ was sold to The Economist of London, he served as editor of The National Interest. 

David W. Messer Royersford, Pa.

Zachariah Paulo Messitte is the 13th president of Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin, and a professor in the Politics and Government Department. He is the author of numerous articles that reflect his interests in politics, international relations, higher education, sports and Italy. His work has appeared in both peer reviewed journals and the national press, including The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, and have covered topics pertaining to the cost of higher education, NCAA Division III student-athletes, Spiro Agnew, the CIA and promoting civil discourse. The author and editor of several books, he most recently co-authored Republican Populist: Spiro Agnew and the Origins of Donald Trump’s America, published by the University of Virginia Press in 2019. 

Larry L. Meyer is former editor of Westways and Colorado magazines and the author of Shadow of a Continent: The American West in 1776. He also is a Lecturer in Journalism at California State University at Long Beach.

Eugene L. Meyer is an author and journalist who writes about both historical and current events, reviews books and contributes features to the Washington Independent Review of Books. He is the author of four books, including Five for Freedom: The African American Soldiers in John Brown's Army and Chesapeake Country, a coffee table book on the Chesapeake Bay region.

William B. Meyer’s essay on how the dismal swamps of the nineteenth century became the priceless wetlands of the twentieth appeared in the May/June issue.

Danny Meyer is the proprietor of some of New York’s most popular restaurants, among them Union Square Café, Gramercy Tavern, and Eleven Madison Park.

Ralph O. Meyer is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Kentucky and earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University of North Carolina. He did experimental research at the University of Arizona and Argonne National Laboratory, and his main career was in technical work for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. For more than 30 years, he studied and wrote about the history and development of the telephone. He writes a technical column for Singing Wires, the journal of Telephone Collectors International, and for the past few years he has been working with North Carolina State University on telephone-related design topics.

Larry L. Meyer is former editor of Westways and Colorado magazines and the author of Shadow of a Continent: The American West in 1776.

John A. Meyer, M.D., is a professor of thoracic surgery at the State University of New York’s Health Science Center in Syracuse and is the author of Lung Cancer Chronicles , published in 1990 by the Rutgers University Press.

David Michaelis is an author and biographer whose work includes national bestsellers such as N. C. Wyeth (Alfred A. Knopf; Harper Perennial), which won the 1999 Ambassador Book Award for Biography, and Schulz and Peanuts (Harper; Harper Perennial), a National Book Critics Circle Best Recommended Book. His most recent book is Eleanor, a breakthrough portrait of America's longest-serving first lady. David Michaelis grew up in Cambridge, Mass., and Washington, D. C., and was educated at Concord Academy and Princeton University. He lives in Westchester County, N. Y., with his family.

—James W. Michaels is the editor of Forbes magazine.

Debra Michals is a journalist and Ph.D. candidate in American history at New York University.

William D. Middleton has published nine books of railroad history, among them a three-volume illustrated history of electrified street, interurban, and main-line railways in America.

Yanek Mieczkowski is a presidential historian and author of Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment: The Race for Space and World Prestige, and The Routledge Historical Atlas of Presidential Elections. He teaches at the Florida Institute of Technology. Previously, he was a professor at the University of Central Florida, The University of Central Florida, and Dowling College. Prof. Mieczkowski earned his masters and PhD in history at Columbia University.

Donald L. Miller is the John Henry MacCracken Professor of History at Lafayette College and a historical consultant and screenwriter. In 2010, Miller won an Emmy Award for his role as a consultant and writer for The Pacific. His 2006 book, Masters of Air, has inspired The Air War, the History Channel's latest installment on World War II.

The interviewer, Nathan Miller, is author of The History of Our Navy , published by AMERICAN HERITAGE and the U.S. Naval Institute, and the newly published FDR: An Intimate History .

John E. Miller was a longtime professor of history at South Dakota State University, where he began teaching in 1973. He was the winner of numerous scholarly awards over that time, including the South Dakota Board of Regents Research Award in 2000, and the Herbert Schell Governor's Award for History in 2001. Miller was also the author of many articles on South Dakota history in scholarly journals, as well as in popular publications such as South Dakota History and South Dakota Heritage. He was co-author of the article on South Dakota in World Book Encyclopedia, and author of several books, including Looking for History of Highway 14; South Dakota: A Journey Through Time; Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little Town: Where History and Literature Meet; and Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind the Legend.

Hanna Miller, a food historian, leads culinary tours in Asheville, North Carolina.

Randall M. Miller is a professor of history at St. Joseph’s College in Philadelphia. The author or editor of more than 20 books, Miller recently completed a book on Lincoln and leadership and another on the Northern home front during the Civil War. A principal advocate for a new interpretation of “freedom” and “unfreedom” at Independence National Historical Park, Miller’s efforts helped to lead to a memorial commemorating the lives of the nine slaves who served at President George Washington’s house at Sixth and Market Streets in Philadelphia. According to Miller, the recognition of Washington’s slaves created a great teaching opportunity that illustrates the struggle to define and realize liberty in America.

Professor Perry Miller teaches American literature at Harvard. He is the author of Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, The Puritans (with T. H. Johnson), The New England Mind , and Jonathan Edwards . © 1952 BY UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

Richard Lawrence Miller is an author and broadcaster who writes on American historical topics. His first book, Truman: The Rise to Power, was published by McGraw-Hill in 1985 and drew outstanding reviews from The Washington Post. In 2008 Miller returned to presidential biographies with his latest book, Lincoln and His World: Prarie Politician, 1834-1842, having previously written about the Cold War, Nazism and the Holocaust, and illegal drugs in the United States.