Delia M. Rios

Delia M. Rios has been a reporter for nearly 25 years, and has worked for the San Jose Mercury News, Dallas Morning News and Newhouse News Service, the national wire service for Newhouse Newspapers.

As a national correspondent for Newhouse News Service, she created and covered a beat called The American Identity, which was developed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to explore who we are as Americans. Her expertise includes the presidency, and she covered the White House for Newhouse in 2005. She has lectured on the American Identity at New York University and at Penn State University. Delia served as a Pulitzer Prize juror in 2006 and helped judge the national reporting category. She has won a National Headliner award and has been recognized for outstanding writing by the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors.

"WEB ONLY STORIES" BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR

"Ich bin ein Berliner": A Kennedy Mistake?

After the President’s inspiring speech, Soviet leaders were left to wonder: Was Kennedy a peacemaker or aggressor? Anticipating a West German tour that on June 26, 1963, would take him to Berlin, President John F. Kennedy expressed worry. Charles de Gaulle had recently gone to Germany and won wide…

Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.