Andrew S. Ward

Andrew S. Ward is the author of The Slaves' War: The Civil War in the Words of Former Slaves, Our Bones are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres and The Indian Mutiny Of 1857, Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Jubilee Singers, and The Blood Seed.

He is a former contributing editor to Atlantic Monthly, commentator for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and columnist for The Washington Post.

Articles by this Author

What Happened At Fort Pillow?, August/September 2005 | Vol. 56, No. 4

Trying to understand the Civil War’s ugliest incident

With Mark Twain, You Can Get Away with Murder, August/September 2003 | Vol. 54, No. 4

Hal Holbrook has lived with him nearly as long as Samuel Clemens did, and he explains why Twain still has the power to delight and to disturb.

They Brought The Jubilee, July/August 2000 | Vol. 51, No. 4

How a small group of former slaves taught the world about black music, the promise of emancipation, and the meaning of the Civil War

Humorist, May/June 1999 | Vol. 50, No. 3

An Interview with the Author of "Little Big Man", May/June 1999 | Vol. 50, No. 3

Thomas Berger, the author of a classic novel of the American West, speaks about its long-awaited sequel, and about what is to be learned in the challenging territory that lies between history and fiction.

Seattle, April 1994 | Vol. 45, No. 2

The strange saga of a town that bragged, burned, and bullied itself into existence, and then became one of the most civilized places on Earth.

The Little Bighorn, April 1992 | Vol. 43, No. 2

Haunted Home, July/august 1990 | Vol. 41, No. 5

When the author moved into a 1905 house on an island near Seattle, he found himself sharing it with the uncommon people who had lived there before him

Our Misplaced President, June 1977 | Vol. 28, No. 4

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.