T. H. Watkins

One of the foremost chroniclers of the American West, T. H. Watkins was an editor at American Heritage for six years and a long-time contributor. He also served as Editor of Wilderness magazine for fifteen years, and as Wallace Stegner Distinguished Professor of Western American Studies at Montana State University.

Watkins is perhaps best known for Righteous Pilgrim, a 1990 biography of Harold L. Ickes, the crusading secretary of the interior for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which was a National Book Award finalist. He also wrote The Hungry Years, The Great Depression: America in the 1930s, and two dozen other books.

Articles by this Author

Belaying History, December 1978 | Vol. 30, No. 1

Too many of our wonderful historic ships have been lost, but funds recently appropriated by Congress will help to see a major part of our history belayed—tied down, secure.

The Social History Of A Singular Fruit, April 1977 | Vol. 28, No. 3

In southern California the orange found a home.

American Characters, December 1977 | Vol. 29, No. 1

Western miners, the hard-rock stiffs, were as tough and horny-handed a breed of men as any in the world.

The Taking Of California, February 1973 | Vol. 24, No. 2

A low comedy for high stakes:

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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.