Richard F. Snow

Richard F. Snow worked 37 years at American Heritage Magazine, serving as Editor-in-Chief for seventeen of them. Born in New York City, he got a summer job as a mail boy at American Heritage during high school, and after studying English and history at Columbia College, returned to work at the magazine full-time. Snow is the author of several books, most recently A Measureless Peril, about the Battle of the Atlantic. Previously, he authored The Iron Road: A Portrait of American Railroading and Coney Island: A Postcard Visit to the City of Fire, as well as two novels, Freelon Starbird and The Burning, and a narrative poem, "The Funny Place." Snow has also consulted for historical motion pictures—among them Glory—and documentaries, including the Burns brothers’ The Civil War and Ken Burns’s World War II documentary. He revisited Coney one more time to work with Ric Burns on the PBS American Experience feature Coney Island, whose screenplay he wrote.

Articles by this Author

"Young Man, I Invented the Modern Age", May/June 2000 | Vol. 51, No. 3

Spearheading D-day, April 2000 | Vol. 51, No. 2

Visiting Normandy with a D-Day Veteran, February/March 2000 | Vol. 51, No. 1

100 Years, 100 Pictures, December 1999 | Vol. 50, No. 8

Farewell to Tuesday's Bar, November 1999 | Vol. 50, No. 7

Reflections on the Kennedy Tragedies and Our Own, October 1999 | Vol. 50, No. 6

The Way It Wasn’t, September 1999 | Vol. 50, No. 5

Goodbye to Bernie the Storyteller, July/August 1999 | Vol. 50, No. 4

Our Readers’ Ratings, May/June 1999 | Vol. 50, No. 3

Jillian’s Story, February/March 1999 | Vol. 50, No. 1

It turns out that my great-grandfather fought to free my daughter.

Not Even The Rat Pack Were Insignificant, December 1998 | Vol. 49, No. 8

The Epic Poem, "John Brown's Body", October 1998 | Vol. 49, No. 6

Some Great Amusement Parks of Yesteryear, September 1998 | Vol. 49, No. 5

Hats Off, July/August 1998 | Vol. 49, No. 4

Some Experts' Opinions, May/June 1998 | Vol. 49, No. 3

Charting the Century, February/March 1998 | Vol. 49, No. 1

This Special Issue, December 1997 | Vol. 48, No. 8

A Parent's Use of World War II as a Teaching Aid, November 1997 | Vol. 48, No. 7

Listening to "The Education of Henry Adams", September 1997 | Vol. 48, No. 5

Four Booze Concoctions for the 4th, July/August 1997 | Vol. 48, No. 4

On TV, May/June 1997 | Vol. 48, No. 3

Some Called It the N_____ Ship, February/March 1997 | Vol. 48, No. 1

In Quotations, December 1996 | Vol. 47, No. 8

The Rose-Colored Windshield, November 1996 | Vol. 47, No. 7

The New Civil War, October 1996 | Vol. 47, No. 6

Chicken Feed, September 1996 | Vol. 47, No. 5

A Share in the Whole Ship, July/August 1996 | Vol. 47, No. 4

Tax Timing, May/June 1996 | Vol. 47, No. 3

Our Civil War Cd-rom, February/March 1996 | Vol. 47, No. 1

Unsordid, December 1995 | Vol. 46, No. 8

"WEB ONLY STORIES" BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR

Letter From The Editor: Zeebrugge and A Shau

The port of Bruges lies eight miles inland from the Belgian coast, served by a canal that opens to the sea at Ostend and Zeebrugge. In the bitter spring of 1918 Bruges Harbor teemed with German destroyers and U-boats that regularly came out to continue their years-long effort to starve Britain into…

Letter From The Editor: Underrated

It’s back again, and six years of experience has taught me that it’s going to make some readers angry. Others will tell us it’s their favorite feature. Save for a now-distant cover story about Jane Fonda, nothing we’ve published has elicited such vehement responses as “Overrated & Underrated.”…

Letter From The Editor: Anniversary

September 11, 2001, was my daughter’s first day of kindergarten—a new school a long subway ride up the spine of Manhattan. Rebecca’s inaugural school day consisted of half an hour meeting other children, followed by a four-hour walk home. When the school opened again, her teacher told me, “She’s…

Letter From The Editor: War Memorials

One dour morning early this March I had to drive to eastern Pennsylvania. I’d heard that a patch of the sometime steel town of Bethlehem had been spruced up and now was a bower of postindustrial charm, so after my errand I made a detour and headed over to see it. I drove up a hill and across a…

Letter From The Editor: Old News

The father of my colleague Carla Davidson was a newspaperman back in the racy violence of the Front Page days; he was also an accomplished novelist and television writer and a historian of wide interests. But he never could bring himself to care much about what he called “short-pants history,” by…

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