Authors

Benjamin Cheever has written four novels — The Plagiarist, The Partisan, Famous After Death, and The Good Nanny—and two nonfiction works, Selling Ben Cheever and Strides: Running Through History With an Unlikely Athlete. He is also the editor of The Letters of John Cheever. Cheever has also been a reporter for The New York Times, The Nation, and The New Yorker. He is also an editor at Reader's Digest

A native of Wyoming and holder of a doctorate in literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Lynne Cheney is a Social and Cultural Studies senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Dr. Cheney previously served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities after working as an editor and a freelance writer. Married to former Vice President Dick Cheney, she was the Second Lady of the United States from 2001 to 2009. She is also the author of James Madison: A Life Reconsidered and numerous books of history for young readers.

Ron Chernow is an award-winning American biographer whose first book, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance, won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 1990. His more recent works have received similar acclaim, including the 1998 biography Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and 2004's Alexander Hamilton. Both works were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His book Washington: A Life, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2011 after its 2010 publication. Mr. Chernow is a past president of PEN American Center, the leading book writer's organization in the U.S. He currently serves on the Executive Board of the Society of American Historians.   

Lindsay M. Chervinsky, Ph.D. is White House Historian and an expert on the cabinet, the presidency, and political institutions. She received her BA in history and political science from the George Washington University and her masters and PhD from the University of California, Davis. Her first book The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution came out in Spring 2020, from Harvard University Press. She is on Twitter @lmchervinsky.

A staff writer for the National Observer and a previous contributor to this magazine, Mr. Chew has been interested in the equine species since he exercised hunters and steeplechasers as a boy in Virginia. He was the recipient of the Magazine Journalism Award of the Thoroughbred Racing Association in ig6g for his article on trainer John Cotter and his wife, Mary, a show rider.

—Frederick J. Chiaventone, a novelist and screenwriter, is a retired Army officer and professor emeritus of international security affairs at the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College. His most recent book, Moon of Bitter Cold , is a novel of Red Cloud’s war.

Thomas Childers serves as the Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. A native Tennessean, Professor Childers specializes in Modern German history and World War II. His works include a multi-volume history of World War II that includes Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down Over Germany in World War II, published in 1995, and In the Shadows of War, a History Book Club selection for 2003.

Marquis W. Childs is Washington correspondent and columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He has covered Washington since 1934 and is the author of a number of books, best known of which is Sweden—The Middle Way .

Ken Chowder has scripted over 25 documentary films (and one feature film) broadcast on BBC, NBC, TBS, Discovery, A & E, and PBS. His credits include seven films for PBS’ The American Experience, including "John Brown's Holy War", one American Masters,and seven National Geographic films. Mr. Chowder has written three acclaimed novels: Blackbird Days, Delicate Geometry and Jadis. All were published by Harper & Row.

David Chrisinger is the Executive Director of the Public Policy Writing Workshop at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy and the Director of Writing Seminars for The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit newsroom dedicated to reporting on the human impact of military Service. Chrisinger is the author of several books, including The Soldier's Truth: Ernie Pyle and the Story of World War II and Stories Are What Save Us: A Survivor’s Guide to Writing about Trauma.

Paul H. Chrystal, Jr., was a member of the FDNY, Engine Company 43, from January 1979 to April 1980, and then of Ladder Company 59, until March 1986. He is currently a fire commissioner in Eastchester, New York.

Allen Churchill has written several books on historical subjects. Among the most recent are The Year the World Went Mad , the story of 1927, and The Improper Bohemians , an account of Greenwich Village in its heyday.

Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., is Curator of American Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

General Mark W. Clark was Commander in Chief of U.S. Ground Forces in Europe in 1942. After the war he became chief of U.S. forces in Austria, and from 1952 to 1953 he commanded the United Nations forces in Korea.

Admiral Joseph J. "Jocko" Clark, USN (1893 – 1971) commanded aircraft carriers during World War II and was the author of Carrier Admiral with Clark G. Reynolds (1967). Born and raised in Oklahoma and a native of the Cherokee Nation, he was the first Native American to graduate from the United States Naval Academy, in 1917.

Neil M. Clark is a free-lance writer living in South Strafford, Vermont.

“Ronald W. Clark is a British historian, novelist, and biographer. The preceding article was adapted by Mr. Clark from his forthcoming book, Freud: The Man and the Cause , which will be published in June by Random House.

Charles S. Clark is a veteran Washington journalist who has written and edited for The Washington Post, Congressional Quarterly, National Journal, Government Executive, and many other publications. Clark is the author of George Washington Parke Custis: A Rarefied Life in America's First Family, about the life of George Washington's stepgrandson, and is a former research fellow at the Washington Library at Mount Vernon. 

Earl Clark is a former newspaper editor who now writes free-lance. His article on an 1892 Idaho mine war, “ Shootout in Burke Canyon ,” which appeared in the August, 1971, issue of AMERICAN HERITAGE , won the Spur Award of the Western Writers of America for the best western short subject published that year.

We are sorry to report that Frank Clark died during the preparation of this article. He had wished to thank Kathy A. Johnson for her help in preparing the initial manuscript, which he called Pilot for Peace .

Known as the "Prophet of the Space Age", Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (1917 – 2008) was a British science and science fiction writer, futurist, inventor, and television series host. Considered one of leading thinkers and proponents of space exploration, he is widely credited for conceiving of the idea of a satellite communication system in a seminal essay he wrote in 1945 while developing air defense radar systems as a young physicist during World War II. 

James M. Clash covers mutual funds and adventure travel at FORBES Magazine in New York City.

George R. Clay, the author of this article on nineteenthcentury children, is a freelance writer who has published short stories in a number of magazines, principally the New Yorker . “I’m currently on the staff of the New York State Historical Association,” he writes, “live in Cooperstown, and have five twentieth-century children.”

Rudolf A. Clemen is executive vice president of the Society of American Historians. This article is an excerpt from an address before the Historical Society of Princeton.

Robert M. Clements, Jr., is headmaster of Hillbrook School, a country day school in Los Gatos, California.

Clark McAdams Clifford (1906 — 1998) was a highly influential American lawyer who served United States Presidents Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter. He served as White House Counsel from 1946 to 1950 during the Truman Administration. Johnson named him Secretary of Defense in 1968 replacing Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War. After Johnson left office, Clifford resumed his legal practice and lobbying work, in which he was considered one of Washington's "superlawyers."

Eleanor Clift is a regular panelist on PBS’s “The McLaughlin Group” and is the author of Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment .

Catherine Clinton is a Professor of History at Queen's University Belfast. She specializes in American History, with an emphasis on the history of the South. She studied sociology and African-American History at Harvard University graduating in 1973.Clinton received her Ph.D from Princeton University, after completing her dissertation on under the direction of James M. McPherson.She has held academic positions at numerous institutions of higher learning, including Union College, Harvard University - Du Bois Institute, Afro-American Studies Dept., History Dept., Warren Center Affiliate, Brandeis University, and Brown University, Wofford, The University of Richmond and more.Ms. Clinton is the author of Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (2004), Fanny Kemble's Civil Wars ,(2006) Mrs. Lincoln: A Life (2009) and Mary Chesnut's Diary (2011)

A retired college teacher, Mark Coburn dwells in Durango, Colorado.  His writings include a book on General Sherman, articles on Mark Twain, and a co-authored children’s book on Lewis and Clark. 

Andrew Coe is a food writer and scholar, and the author of Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States and A Square Meal, A Culinary History of the Great Depression, and a coauthor of Foie Gras: A Passion.  Mr. Coe has written for Serious Eats NY, The Atlantic, Saveur, Gastronomica, Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times, and contributed to the Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.    

Edward M. Cqffman is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin and author of The War to End All Wars (Oxford University Press, 1968). The Hodgson letters, previously unpublished, are in the Elsenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas.

Jonathan Cohen is a poet, translator, essayist, and scholar with expertise in inter-American literature. His essays on American topics have appeared in numerous periodicals, including The New York Times, The Hudson Review, Literary Imagination, and The American Voice.  Cohen is the author of A Pan-American Life (Wisconsin), the first biography of poet-translator Muna Lee, and he is the editor/compiler of the first collection of William Carlos Williams’s translations of Spanish-language poetry, By Word of Mouth (New Directions). 

Miss Coit, the author of six books, won a Pulitzer prize in 1951 for her biography John C. Calhoun: American Portrait. Her second book, Mr. Baruch (1957), depicts the transformation of a post-Reconstruction South Carolinean into the Wall Street entrepreneur.  Coit also coauthored two accounts of the early American nation, The Growing Years: 1789-1829 (1963) and The Sweep Westward: 1829-49 (1963). 

A specialist in Alaskan history, Terrence Cole has just published a biography of E. T. Barnette, the founder of Fairbanks.

Ryan Cole, a former assistant to Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels and speechwriter at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, holds degrees in history and journalism from Indiana University. Mr. Cole has written extensively about American history and literature for the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the New Criterion, Civil War Times, the American Interest, and the Indianapolis Star. Additionally, he has written for Indiana University and the Lumina Foundation, and he served on the staff of the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.  

After working on country newspapers for twenty-five years, John N. Cole now writes a column for the Maine Times and articles for magazines.

Jane Colihan served as a Senior Editor at American Heritage.

Ronald Collins was the Harold S. Shefelman Scholar at the University of Washington School of Law and a nationally recognized authority on the First Amendment. Collins has authored or co-authored 14 books including Robotica: Speech Rights & Artificial Intelligence (2017, co-authored with David Skover) and Nuanced Absolutism: Floyd Abrams & the First Amendment.  In 2002, the Los Angeles Times selected his book The Trials of Lenny Bruce (co-authored with David Skover) as one of the best of the year. Collins is one of the founders and co-directors of The History Book Festival, which launched in Lewes, Delaware in 2017.

Ace Collins is the author of Songs Sung Red, White, and Blue: The Stories Behind America’s Best-Loved Patriotic Songs .

—Terry Golway is the city editor of the New York Observer and the author of The Irish in America (Hyperion) and Irish Rebel (St. Martin’s).

Mr. Colwell, formerly a mechanical engineer, died in 1967. In preparing this narrative about his maternal grandfather he was assisted by his brother, Hubert Emmett Colwell, a retired army officer who lives in Stuyvesant, New York.

Stiles Tuttle Colwill is curator of paintings at the Maryland Historical Society.

A longtime member of the editorial advisory board of AMERICAN HERITAGE, Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998) taught at New York University, Columbia, and Amherst College, and authored more than forty books. He first gained attention in 1930 as co-author, with Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, of The Growth of the American Republic, which became a standard textbook for decades. His anthology Documents of American History (1938) remained a widely used collection of primary sources for many years. Among his forty books and 700 essays and reviews, his principal scholarly work was The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880's (1950)

Oliver Conant is a New York-based writer and critic.

Manuel A. Conley, a career Army officer, frequently writes of military history.

When Joseph Conlin is not writing labor history or teaching it at California State University, Chico, he is eating all the oyster he can get his hands on.

Jennifer Connelly is a member of the Board of Directors of Invest in Others Charitable Foundation and provides pro-bono PR services to the Guitars Over Guns Organization (GOGO). She is also a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) and a founding member of Chief, an exclusive network for women in marketing and media. She is also a contributor for Financial Advisor Magazine.