Robert M. Utley

Robert M. Utley is a writer and historian of the American West who served as the chief historian of the National Park Service. Utley has written over a dozen books on the West, including the classic American Heritage History of the Indian Wars.

Utley also authored Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life and Lone Star Justice: The First Century of the Texas Rangers. In 2004 University of Oklahoma Press released his memoirs, titled Custer and Me: A Historian's Memoir.

Articles by this Author

Great Books on the American West, November/December 2004 | Vol. 55, No. 6

Tales of the Texas Rangers, June/July 2002 | Vol. 53, No. 3

There have never been many of them, and they haven’t always behaved well. But, for more than a century now, they’ve been one of the most famous law-enforcement outfits in the world.

Billy-the-Kid Country, April 1991 | Vol. 42, No. 2

The legend of the most notorious of all outlaws belongs to the whole world now. But, to find the grinning teenager who gave rise to it, you must visit the New Mexico landscape where he lived his short life.

The Ordeal of Plenty Horses, December 1974 | Vol. 26, No. 1

Caught between two cultures, a young Sioux sought to make himself a hero—by killing an army officer

Epilogue, June 1971 | Vol. 22, No. 4

Twenty years after the Little Bighorn— what happened to a fighting people

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.