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

Hometown, May/June 1991 | Vol. 42, No. 3

Reading The Numbers, February/March 1991 | Vol. 42, No. 1

Credentials, December 1990 | Vol. 41, No. 8

Prize Authors, September/October 1990 | Vol. 41, No. 6

At Mobile Bay, March 1990 | Vol. 41, No. 2

It Happened Here, March 1990 | Vol. 41, No. 2

Collecting History, April 1989 | Vol. 40, No. 3

Wherever you travel in this country, you have a good chance of bringing a piece of the past home with you.

Bud And Slam, March 1989 | Vol. 40, No. 2

When They Really Loved New York, November 1988 | Vol. 39, No. 7

Trenton And Princeton, December 1987 | Vol. 38, No. 8

Biggest Of The Four, December 1987 | Vol. 38, No. 8

Counsel For The Indefensible, February/March 1987 | Vol. 38, No. 2

Herman Haupt, February/March 1985 | Vol. 36, No. 2

The Man Who Discovered Turner’s Secret, December 1985 | Vol. 37, No. 1

He devoted his entire life to finding signatures only he could see.

The ‘Holland’ Surfaces, April/May 1984 | Vol. 35, No. 3

The U.S. Navy’s first submarine was scrapped half a century ago. But now we have been given a second chance to visit a boat nobody ever expected to see again.

Growing Up Suburban, February/March 1984 | Vol. 35, No. 2

Not The Brooklyn Bridge, October/November 1983 | Vol. 34, No. 6

It was built by Roebling, connects two cities, is a landmark of American engineering, and looks just like it but is…

Charles Tyson Yerkes: The Streetcar Baron Who Got Rich Twice, August/september 1983 | Vol. 34, No. 5

Alexander Agassiz:
A Reluctant Millionaire, April/May 1983 | Vol. 34, No. 3

Christopher Latham Sholes: The Seventy-sixth Inventor Of The Typewriter, August/September 1982 | Vol. 33, No. 5

E O. Matthiessen: The Teacher As Creative Spirit, June/july 1982 | Vol. 33, No. 4

American Characters, April/May 1982 | Vol. 33, No. 3

Henry Ware Lawton

American Characters: Lincoln Steffens, February/March 1982 | Vol. 33, No. 2

AMERICAN CHARACTERS

Winfield Scott Schley: The Vilified Victor, December 1982 | Vol. 34, No. 1

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, October/november 1981 | Vol. 32, No. 6

James Hazen Hyde, August/september 1981 | Vol. 32, No. 5

Martin Couney, June/July 1981 | Vol. 32, No. 4

George Labram, April/May 1981 | Vol. 32, No. 3

Henry Wager Halleck, February/March 1981 | Vol. 32, No. 2

William Hope Harvey, December 1981 | Vol. 33, No. 1

"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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